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Business method patents are a special class of patents that allow companies to assert ownership over technologies and the ways in which those technologies are put to use. Looking at the history of business method patents in the United States and the recent resurgence of this type of patent activity in the mobile and handheld computing sectors, I argue that business method and related software patents act as quiet quests for control over information and cultural practices. Business method and software patents highlight how certain actors use moments of technological change to secure economic and cultural advantages through law and regulation. Instead of fostering innovation and rewarding inventors, these patents are an impractical form of intellectual property that seeks to mimic traditional conceptions of physical objects in an era of digital goods. This article serves as a call for scholars undertaking research on the migration of media and culture to new digital formats and devices to consider how patents act as protocols that pre-inscribe devices with certain features, gestures, and meanings. As an increasing variety of cultural goods such as music, movies, and books migrate into digital formats online, business method and software patents have significant implications for the production, circulation, and use of digital commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the increasing integration of social media into music making and marketing to reflect on the work artists and their fans perform. While new technologies are celebrated for making cultural production more accessible, there is also more pressure on artists, as cultural entrepreneurs, to produce and distribute their own work. At the same time, fans are facing greater invocations to participate through overt calls to become co-creators or through more passive participation like behavior tracking. Fans cannot really consume without working. Using an analysis of British musician Imogen Heap—including press articles and data scrapes from Heap's social media accounts—this paper focuses on the changing occupational and creative roles for artists and fans and the attendant implications for the circulation of cultural goods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the rise of cloud computing, specifically for music. More than just new technologies for distribution, cloud services establish a fundamentally different relationship between listeners and their music. As the metaphor suggests, the cloud offers an infinite space where music is ever available, but cloud services also act as transient and enclosed spaces where the music we "own" is always at an ethereal distance. Cloud-based music services represent a particular cultural model of music distribution -- one that enmeshes users in a network of technologies and a process of continual commodification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, podcasting has grown into one of the most important media forms in the world. This article argues that podcasting's unique technical affordances — particularly RSS feeds and user-entered metadata — open up productive methods for exploring the cultural practices and meanings of the medium. We share three different methods for studying RSS feeds and podcast metadata: 1) visualizing how topics and keywords trend over time; 2) visualizing networks of commonly associated keywords entered by podcasters; and 3) analyzing norms and common practices for the duration of podcasts (as a time-based media format, podcasting is unusual in that it is not bound by the programming schedules and technical limitations that provide strict parameters for most audiovisual forms). The methods and preliminary results reveal how metadata can function as a surrogate for studying large collections of time-based media objects. Yet our study also shows that, when it comes to born digital media, the metadata are never fully separate from the objects they describe. We argue that future work in AV in DH needs to delineate between methods best suited for digitized media collections compared to those most appropriate for born digital media collections. We share three different methods for studying RSS feeds and podcast metadata: 1) visualizing how topics and keywords trend over time; 2) visualizing networks of common associated keywords entered by podcasters; and 3) analyzing norms and common practices for the duration of podcasts (as a time-based media format, podcasting is unusual in that it is not bound by the programming schedules and technical limitations that provide strict parameters for most audiovisual forms). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]