I love the highly - specific title of this academic newspaper publisher by Melissa Tatum , Robert Spoo , and Banjamin Pope : “ Does Gender Influence Attitudes Toward Copyright in the Filk Community ? ” It combines three raging - button issues : copyright , gender , and fandom . It ’s a like a powder kegful of things people have very substantial opinions on .
Tatum et . al . ’s paper was published in the American University Journal of Gender , Social Policy & the Law . They did an nasty lot of workplace to discover very few sex differences .
The authors begin by fix filk , which is something a spate of us just know about . But imagine some stuffy law of nature professor endeavor to parse this :
“ Filk ” is the term used to draw the medicine of the scientific discipline fabrication community , and “ filkers ” are the appendage of the filk community of interests and are most usually found participating in song circles at science fiction conventions .
From there , the composition breaks down filk into eight case :
There are , then , eight introductory permutation of filk Song dynasty :
1 ) Original lyrics to an original melody ;
2 ) Original lyrics to a traditional melody ;
3 ) Original lyrics to a tonal pattern under copyright ;
4 ) Original lyric to a melody compose by another filker ;
5 ) Lyrics based on character / existence create by another somebody and set to an original line ;
6 ) Lyrics based on character / universe created by another person and set to a melodic phrase in the public domain ;
7 ) Lyrics establish on characters / universe created by another individual and set to melody under right of first publication by someone else ; and
- Lyrics based on characters / universe created by another person and set to a tune composed by another filker .
The second incision of the paper detail the copyright yield presented by each of these categories , with the original works / those based on public sphere Song dynasty being fine and the work incorporate other people ’s oeuvre presenting more issues .
But the veridical meat of the newspaper is in Section III . Section III contain the original research done by the generator . First , a database of 895 filks were collected in a database , with certain facts about the songs noted : sex of the writer , whether the birdcall included copyrighted material , the long time of the strain , whether the songs were nominated for honour , etc . Second , a survey about mental attitude to copyright were send out to filkers for response . The sight reveal very few difference of opinion in the gender , which seemed to point that the feelings filkers had about both what was appropriate music type and right of first publication was n’t gender correlated .
The statistic analytic thinking of filks was more interesting . The 895 songs studied were collect from the Pegasus Award ( a major filk award ) , songs mentioned in the Filk Hall of Fame induction citations , and a random sample distribution of songs bring out in the filk magazine Xenofilkia . And , according to “ Does Gender Influence Attitudes Toward Copyright in the Filk Community?”‘s data , there ’s been a sharp cliff in the publication of female - author filks . Here ’s their chart :
And yet , far more adult female authors than virile one had been given Pegasus Award nominations . The authors speculated that the reason for this disparity was that the magazine they take for their publishing statistics tends to privilege filks that do not use original melodies , and the statistics see women write more original songs than workforce :
The statistics show that the type of melody used is powerfully dependant on gender . For example , females were more likely to utilise wholly original line ( females 30.0 % , males 21.4 % ) , while Male were more probable to use a copyrighted melody ( males 40.5 % , females 35.1 % ) or the melody of another filker ( males 25.2 % , females 19.5 % ) . Put differently , 45.3 % of females used a melody that was not dependent to someone else ’s copyright , while only 34.3 % of male did . Conversely , 65.7 % of males adopt someone else ’s copyright melody , while only 54.6 % of females did .
While melody was correlated with sex , originality in language was not :
in the end , the Pegasus Award nominating address had cutting number that generally showed equal distribution among the sexuality , with females favour a bit overall . At the time of this newspaper publisher , 6.1 % of females were nominate multiple times — compared with 3.4 % of males — and 84.3 % of males had never been put forward for a Pegasus — compared with 74.4 % of female .
In ending , the generator felt that they could only make a few provisional conclusion based on their data . For distaff filkers , they proposed this :
Women in the filk community are more likely than men to produce original melodic line to accompany their lyric , while charwoman are only somewhat more potential to borrow from others ’ lyrics than are men . Because filk is often take in as an imitative cultivation , the disposition of women to quit from that ethos in creating their own melodies seems pregnant . It might reveal a enhance contextual sensitiveness to the legal right hand of others , a sensitiveness also suggested by the greater number of female respondents who believed that filkers should give credit to the authors from whom they borrow , and should not record copyright work without permission . Similarly , distaff respondents were much more likely to define fairish economic consumption as not turn a profit from others ’ work , and somewhat more likely to define it as pay credit to the original author and make secret as opposed to public exercise of a protected body of work .
For male filkers , the authors gave these tentative conclusions :
Male filkers , on the other handwriting , offer fewer responses about how to define sightly use ( frame 12 ) , while being significantly more likely to assert that they see all sound requirements before take in filk activities ( Figure 11 ) . That valet de chambre record a markedly greater tendency than woman to take up the melodies of others would seem to be consistent with the imitative , competitive , and satirical impulse behind filking , and may suggest that attitudes of piece and women to exploit these impulsion differ in certain esteem .
Male answerer , however , were slimly less potential than distaff respondents to make usage of the language of others , i.e. , slightly more likely to create their own original words . Some of this may reckon , however , on what respondent meant by “ original ” lyrics . Men might have been suggest , for example , that filk lyrics that borrow from others ’ songs but transform those lyrics to some level are “ original ” lyrics . cleaning woman might have been more loath to make that claim , specially in light of their great sensitivity to giving credit to other authors and their markedly greater tendency to define clean use as not turn a profit from others ’ piece of work .
I ’d add that the survey resultant also indicated that far more of the woman filkers were “ artists ” as fight to manful filkers who were students or in expert fields . The attitude of the female filkers , especially that about credit , and the movement toward original strain is consistent with artist . While the fact that the male respondents are more potential hobbiests with caper unrelated to making music does delineate up with the trust on existing melodies .
In the closing , though , the paper reveals far fewer differences between the genders than it does difference , which is a nice modification of pace .
If you have more examples of first-class academic body of work on fandom , please send them to me at[email protected]or air me a link Twitter:@k_trendacosta .
Coryn Wolk viaWikimedia Commons|CC BY 2.0
Photo credits ( in order):Fellowship ! The Musical Parody of The Fellowship of the Ring
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