Past Events

Kembrew McLeod
Assistant Professor,
University of Iowa
Department of Communication Studies
Intellectual Property Law and Culture, Popular Culture, Popular Music, Media Industries

A journalist, activist, artist, and professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa, Kembrew McLeod is the author of Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law and Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. Professor Mcleod has written music criticism for Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Spin, and Mojo. He is also the co-producer of a 2001 documentary on the music industry, Money for Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music.
http://kembrew.com

Media Literacy and Citizenship: Building a Semiotic Democracy in the Age of Intellectual Property

Popular culture provides artists - and everybody else - with a kind of shorthand, a tool for expressing ourselves. By choosing our media-culled words wisely, we can convey a wide range of meanings and emotions, sometimes with only one monosyllabic utterance. In face-to-face interactions we can still refer to a variety of intellectual properties we encounter in everyday life, and we will continue to do so without inhibition. But in the multi-media space that is the Web, for instance, the metaphorical intellectual property police can (and do) invade our homes in the form of cease-and-desist emails.

As a media scholar, I am interested in exploring how the law structures communication, potentially limiting free expression in a hyper-commercial age, and I will document the ways in which people have resisted those limitations.

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