In a nutshell, Foucault’s argument is that the word author is more complex than society thinks it is. In his eyes, the way we view authors is not complicated enough. He is basically saying that the author is not one thing, he is a mixture of several different components.

I understand the example’s Foucault uses to validate his point on the actual name of an author, but I’m not quite sure how that fits into his argument, or the significance of that point.

I am also a bit confused by the middle paragraph on page 119, when he calls for “a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author.” He says “It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in a absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone, and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure.” I sounds like what he is calling for is much like the blogsphere, where anyone is free to create content. Even though blog writers are not professional writers, I still consider them authors, because he or she is the author of that blog, so I’m not sure what Foucault is asking for. It is probably because his definition of an author is different from mine and I’m not quite sure what his definition really is. Once I fully understand his argument of what an author actually is, the whole thing will probably make more sense to me.

At first glance, the copyright laws seem like they are working pretty well. I never really gave them a second thought. Copyright laws are simply part of society, integrated into out daily culture. However, after listening to Lawrence Lessig’s lecture about the problems with copyright laws, I began to see the problem.

As I searched through dozens of articles on copyright, I found an article on the NPR site about the controversy around the rights to Marilyn Monroe’s image.  Josh Greene, the son of Monroe’s favorite photographer is about to loose the rights to the photographs that his father took of the starlet. Monroe left her estate to her acting coach, who is now deceased. His widow, Lee Strasberg now controls the image of Marilyn Monroe. Greene is about to loose the photographs that his father took, because of a new bill that Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed.

“The law essentially says that famous people can pass on the rights to their image to anyone they want — and the right exists even if they died decades ago”

Because of this law, Greene could lose some of the most important photographs that his father took. They will be taken from him by a woman who hardly knew Monroe, simply because she controls her image. His father took the pictures. Greene deserves the rights to the photographs. If a photographer took a picture of a tree, the picture would not belong to the tree, it would belong to the photographer.

How do you decide what is more important; the photographer or the person being photographed?