Literary ‘war’ over Adam David poetry project

Weeks after writer Adam David removed his appropriative work It will be the same/but not quite the same from public access online, local literary writers have stuck to their guns and continued spewing fire against each other in the name of literary freedom.

David received a letter from intellectual property lawyers dated April 13, 2015, forcing him to take down within 5 days the sites on Mediafire and Blogspot where he uploaded his appropriative work.

The demand letter was written on behalf of Noelle Q. de Jesus, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, and Anvil Publishing, as joint copyright owners of the micro fiction anthology Fast Food Fiction Delivery Volume 2, from which David took portions for his hypertext found poetry project.

David was accused of four grounds of copyright infringement based on reproduction right, other communication to the public of the work, publisher’s right, and moral rights. He was also threatened with a fine of P150,000 and imprisonment of one to three years for each count if he did not comply.

On April 19, David took down the downloadable file from both sites. He retained the blog account and posted a rationale of his project explaining that his work of literary criticism “is a part of what aims to be a multimedia critical response” to the anthology, the first part of which is the micro review "Nutrition Facts: Always Look at the Label."

In his blog, David explained how he made the project. “I went through the anthology and copied four sentences per story – specifically the first and last sentences, and two random sentences somewhere in between. Sometimes a sentence would have five words, sometimes ten,” David explained. “Some sentences were around fifty words long, and a few were made up of a single word. I typed them all out in four rows and encoded a hypertext machine in Javascript to generate random combinations of what amounted to roughly two hundred and seventy two sentences, which I predicted would come up with new stories expressing coherence despite their disparate origins,” he said.

The incident has since received mixed reactions from the literary community, some dubbing it a David and Goliath situation.

On April 18, a massive campaign was started on Facebook to gather support for David. Marc Anthony Cayanan posted the collective statement “Order in the Food Court” the same day asserting, “David’s work, accessible through Mediafire and Blogspot, is consistent with the trajectory of his writing, which—from The El Bimbo Variations to Than Then Than—has questioned notions of originality and displayed an impertinent stance to literary tradition and an aggressive repurposing of source texts, often to humorous yet critical effect.” It was signed by writers from various literary cliques and genres.

Writers including Karl de Mesa and Adrian Dollente Mendizabal cited Section 185 of Republic Act 10372, which stipulates:

“SEC. 185. Fair Use of a Copyrighted Work. – 185.1. The fair use of a copyrighted work for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching including limited number of copies for classroom use, scholarship, research, and similar purposes is not an infringement of copyright. Decompilation, which is understood here to be the reproduction of the code and translation of the forms of a computer program to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs may also constitute fair use under the criteria established by this section, to the extent that such decompilation is done for the purpose of obtaining the information necessary to achieve such interoperability.”

Philippines Graphic editor-in-chief Joel Pablo Salud, in his piece "National Literary Month just caught fire", traced the issue back to March 16, 2014, when “poet Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta posted a call for submission on Facebook. Fast Food Fiction Delivery Volume 2: an anthology of micro-fiction. Mookie described it as ‘the encore to Noelle de Jesus’ well-received Fast Food Fiction.’ Mookie was to be its co-editor. On that very same day, Adam David shared over his Facebook account the call for submissions with this post: ‘Will probably be just as full of empty calories as real fast food.’”

Salud stretched the issue further back, saying, “If memory serves, writer Sarge Lacuesta (husband to Mookie) posted a comment in answer to Adam David’s post. This prompted other writers to take up the issue, asking why Adam David—a literary critic—would go out of his way to harangue a book project at the onset of its production. Stories have yet to be submitted at the time, and as a literary critic, no one is stopping him from criticizing the book after it sees publication. Thus, David’s pot-shot at the project prior to reaching its final form, many believed, reeked of malice.”

He also said that “in the digital book’s third page, Adam David claimed it as his own copyrighted material for 2015.”

Also airing their side were contributors to the anthology, such as Butch Dalisay, whose work was mentioned in the demand letter as an example. Sarge Lacuesta posted Dalisay’s reaction on his Facebook account on April 21.

Dalisay said the issue was no big deal to him, mentioning a similar work by Angelo Suarez. But he also made it clear that Anvil and the anthology editors have the right to sue Adam for copyright infringement.

Writer Gina Apostol, in her recent blog entry In all conscience, I thought I’d comment, in her attempt to shed light on the matter, said, “There may be valid legal reasons behind Anvil’s action. But just because one can sue does not mean one should.” — BM, GMA News