Finally, an excuse to exercise my photoshop skills with my academic writing!  I’ve posted a short piece on the commonalities between the Eliot Estate and John Deere tractors, on the University of Minnesota Press Blog.  Here’s an excerpt:

You can credit this kind of madness to two things: our cultural reverence for solitary genius, and our state and corporate paranoia over unregulated information exchange—best manifested in digital networks. Both have led to overreaches in intellectual property law, granting copyright holders (not necessarily the original creators) de facto veto power over subsequent artists and denying ownership of material objects through licensing schemes.