Duke University Press Log

Three Podcasts for Your Weekend Listening Pleasure

Heading out for a bike ride, a car trip, or just cleaning your house this weekend? We offer you three great podcasts with our authors to accompany whatever you might be doing.

First, check out EddyFest 2011, a three part interview with famed music writer Chuck Eddy on RockCritics.com. Eight rock critics interview Eddy about his new book Rock And Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism.

Then, turn your attention to film with this interview with Robert J. Corber on New Books in Pop Culture. Corber is the author of Homosexuality in Cold War America and In the Name of National Security. In his latest book, Cold War Femme, Corber reads Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate how Cold War homophobia focused on the femme as the lesbian who posed the greatest threat to the nation.

Finally, look at where law and music intersect: in the realm of copyright. In a podcast interview for New Books in Law, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, co-authors of Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, talk the about legal and the cultural implications of digital sampling in the music industry and how hiphop has changed as copyright law enforcement has become stricter.

After you listen, we hope you'll decide you want to learn more by reading the books!

Judith Armatta on the Arrest of Ratko Mladic

The President of Serbia announced today that his government had captured accused war criminal Ratko Mladic, former head of the Bosnian Serb Army, and would transfer him to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague for trial. Judith Armatta, author of Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, has written this guest post about the significance of the arrest:

The arrest of Ratko Mladic demonstrates how far the world community has moved from providing warlords and tyrants with golden parachutes. The arrest of Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarek and the indictment of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi provide further evidence of the degree to which accountability for crimes by the powerful has taken root. Mubarek will stand trial in Egypt before an Egyptian court. Gaddafi has been indicted by the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, an indictment that must be confirmed by a trial chamber of the ICC before an arrest can be made, which at this point is not imminent as Gaddafi remains in power.

International war crimes trials are far more complex than domestic criminal trials. As a result, they take longer. Show trials such as Josef Stalin favored are speedy but do not bring justice. The public’s and especially victims’ frustration with lengthy trials is understandable, and trials need not drag on for over four years as the Milosevic trial did, ultimately robbing victims of a verdict. Milosevic was an ill man when he came to The Hague. His illness combined with the tribunal allowing him to represent himself were largely responsible for the trial’s length. One hopes that international courts have learned from these mistakes. With Mladic’s arrest they have another chance to get it right. 

Judith Armatta is available for interviews. Please contact Publicist Laura Sell at lsell@dukeupress.edu for more information.

Creative License Explores Law and Culture of Music Sampling

The new book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling is just out and the authors, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola are getting around. McLeod appeared on the radio show Sound Opinions a few weeks ago, to talk about sampling with hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot. This week the Future of Music Coalition is featuring an interview with both authors on their website. And McLeod is interviewed by Joe Fassler at TheAtlantic.com today. Peter DiCola is doing events in Washington, DC and Philadelphia this weekend and the two authors will appear together at Iowa City's Prairie Lights bookstore on April 26. Finally, be sure to check out the very cool mixtape that sonic cut-and-paste artist Steinski created to accompany the book. It's features hundreds of songs and samples mashed together with soundbytes from the book. Download it for free here!

Fear of Fair Use

Kembrew McLeod, whose book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (with Peter DiCola ,Jenny Toomey, and Kristin Thomson) will be out in 2011, writes an essay for The Atlantic about the need to change our laws regarding music sampling. An album like Public Enemy's seminal Fear of a Black Planet (1990), which sampled dozens of songs, would lose $5 an album if forced to comply with today's rules. McLeod believes the cumbersome and expensive laws are greatly inhibiting creativity. He advocates a move to a "blanket license" system like the one ASCAP uses to allow radio stations, bars, and live venues to broadcast music. McLeod has just made a documentary about these issues called Copyright Criminals. He is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa.

Study in JHPPL Questions Benefits of Price Protection for Drug Companies

As Congress considers new measures that would provide twelve to fourteen years of price protection beyond patent rights for biological drugs, a new study in the current issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law documents how the European Union granted pharmaceutical companies similar protections without clear evidence that they would benefit patients or increase innovation.

The proposed United States legislation on data exclusivity prohibits generic competitors from using the data gathered to test a drug’s safety and efficacy for the public as part of their application to the Food and Drug Administration.

“Data exclusivity requires buyers to pay prices protected from normal competition,” says Sandra Adamini, the lead author of the study. “It might even apply if the patent has expired.” Drug companies argue that data exclusivity is needed beyond twenty-year patent protection in order to earn back large investments in research and to provide an incentive for more innovation.

Karadzic Trial Begins in The Hague

The trial of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who stands accused of genocide, began yesterday in The Hague. But the accused refused to appear, claiming he needed more time to prepare his defense. Karadzic's recalcitrance will remind many of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic made a mockery of the proceedings and died before a verdict could be issued. Next fall we will publish the definitive account of the Milosevic trial, Judith Armatta's Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Armatta, a lawyer, sat inches away from Milosevic throughout the entire trial as she served as an observer for the Coalition for International Justice, a human rights organization. Her book presents both a day-to-day account of the trial and analysis of its significance as well as personal accounts of victims of the Balkan wars. Armatta argues that the trial set an important precedence and that studying and understanding it is crucial to future efforts to bring war criminals (like Karadzic) to justice. After the jump, read an excerpt from this important forthcoming book.

Timothy Stoltzfus Jost on Health Care Reform

A Washington Post article on health insurance co-ops this weekend quotes Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, author of Health Care at Risk: A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement. Jost says, "If we want to have co-ops in addition to the public plan and in addition to private insurance, that's great, let's see if it works." But if co-ops are the only alternative to private insurance, "then essentially what we have will be private insurance." Jost was also recently featured in a Forbes article about his first-hand experience with the German health care system, and he has been writing regular commentaries on health care reform for the Roanoke Times.

Lucas Hilderbrand Interviewed in OC Weekly

Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC-Irvine, Lucas Hilderbrand, was interviewed in Wednesday's OC Weekly. Hilderbrand is the author of the recently released book, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Besides talking about 1990's banned film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Hildebrand also spoke a little about his project as a whole. For example, Hilderbrand discussed the changing state of the industry while he was developing his book. "I decided the project had to be historical because I couldn't predict what would happen, and anything that was current would be out of date by the time the book was in print. What was striking was that, instead, all the new developments recycled the same issue from the '70s and '80s--the anxieties about piracy, about the industry, about finding new busines models, about allowing audiences new modes of access."

Newly found document brings insight into Chinese-American "Paper Families"

Today's New York Times "City Room" blog has a fascinating post about a recently-found notebook filled with Chinese characters, apparently a crib sheet for use by an illegal immigrant. As Estelle T. Lau wrote in her book Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Chinese the first immigrant group officially excluded from the United States. Chinese Americans took advantage of the system’s loophole: children of U.S. citizens were granted automatic eligibility for immigration. The result was an elaborate system of "paper families," in which U.S. citizens of Chinese descent claimed fictive, or "paper," children who could then use their kinship status as a basis for entry into the United States. This subterfuge necessitated the creation of crib sheets outlining genealogies and providing village maps and other information that could be used during immigration processing. The newly found crib sheet apparently belonged to Chung Fook Wing, who attempted to gain entry into the U.S. in 1923 by pretending to be the son of George Sing of Yonkers. His crib sheet apparently worked and he was allowed into the country, but seventeen years later on a drug possession charge and the notebook was found in a search of his papers at a New York City opium den. The notebook then found its way to the National Archives in New York City, where it languished unstudied until quite recently.

Lucas Hilderbrand in the Independent Weekly

Lucas Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice was reviewed in yesterday's Independent Weekly. Reviewer Gerry Canavan sees Hilderbrand's book as "a sort of love song to the VCR—one much needed in this age of YouTube." He also writes, "Hilderbrand presents a strong case that personal recording technologies (in both analog and digital forms) represent a crucial site for both political struggle and public action, even civil disobedience—implicitly warning that fair use is something that needs to be fought for or else it will be subsumed by copy-protection schemes and corporate enclosure."