Fair Use, Fairey, and Closed Comments

I admit to being a bit of a lurker.

It's not that I don't have feedback. I have a lot of it. But I tend to localize it into quasi-personal Internet spaces, like the falsified “safe walls” of Facebook, updating my Gmail chat status, or Twitter. So there is an element of experimentation in this whole “commenting on commenting” initiative we've got going on. I planned to take the plunge directly and instead of providing my feedback through the spurious safety net of this blog I would boldly post my opinion on directly to the article or piece that struck a chord with me in the first place.

Turns out that is easier said than done.

A friend of mine sent along this article last week about the Associated Press going after graphic artists Shepard Fairey for copyright infringement. As a staunch supporter of our desperate national need for intellectual property policy reforms, I figured this would be a timely and interesting issue to provide feedback on. But as I scanned the responses on the Huffington Post I realized that perhaps it would be more interesting to post my comments in a space where there was less online community consensus around the issue. When someone forwarded the same story to me, but this time NPR's coverage I figured I had struck the gold mine: many of the comments on the article sided with the AP and agreed that Fairey had indeed perpetrated copyright infringement. (Actually, the comments ran the gambit from well phrased positions to complete intellectual failures, but that's another matter all together).

The moral of the story is that the comments were closed. Because I had not responded to the piece in a timely manner (which is how long exactly?) no additional comments were being permitted on the article.

We can envision “commenting” as some sort of evolution of the “letters to the editor” format, but there are some failures in this conception. Unlike the printed newspapers that are typically discarded by the time the next issue is released, journalism online meanders and lingers and travels in unpredictable trajectories. Closing off comments with attention to the timing of the story may be putting up a roadblock to creativity. Just like suing artists for copyright infringement over works that should be covered by fair use does.