| Throughout human history, people have used shared cultural references to express themselves, form group identity, and define their relationship to their world and each other. The characters and stories of a society's myths, folklore, legends, and poetic and prose epics were understood to be a common store of imagery free to all to use. Today, stories and cultural elements are disseminated by television, film, and other media and increasingly fenced off by strategic expansion of copyright law. At the same time that cultural production has become the province of corporations, the Internet has provided people with a new medium for expression. Media fandom, a distinct subculture that predates the Internet, has grown online and modes of appropriation formerly unique to the subculture have spread beyond its boundaries. By making the everyday, personal uses of culture by average people visible, the Internet has brought to a head the tension inherent between copyright law and the First Amendment. This dissertation examines the conflict in the context of a series of clashes between media companies Lucasfilm, Paramount, and Fox and fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, The X Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and concludes that attempts by corporate copyright holders to stretch the law to cover personal use threatens the ability of the intended beneficiaries of the law, the people, to use their own culture. |
