Property rights are the backbone of Western Civilization. Capitalism can only be successful if individuals feel secure about the ownership of their assets. Patents are the property rights granted to the inventor by the government. Without these rights, inventors will find it extremely difficult monetizing their contributions to society. Thus, in an effort to incentivize innovation and commit society to human progress, our Founding Fathers built our country on a strong set of intellectual property rights. At the same time, nothing impedes innovation like a monopoly and, in essence, all a patent amounts to is a monopoly, the right to exclude others from monetizing a specific innovation over an extended period of time. Hence, at the margin, patents increase the incentive to create new patentable knowledge, while simultaneously also stifling the dissemination of that knowledge. A good patent system strikes the right balance between innovation and a government-granted, anti-competitive monopoly. After a 20-year period of an unprecedentedly pro-patent environment in the United States, the value of patents has never been higher. Patents, as opposed to their intended use of incentivizing innovation, are now seen as a form of protection against litigation, and also a weapon to litigate patent infringements to extract license fees and royalty payments from companies who are supposedly in violation of these patents. The pendulum has swung, and patents are now stifling innovation to an extent not conceived of by our Founding Fathers. This thesis will explore the reasons for the extreme increase in the value of patents over the years and will attempt to propose a plan of action to swing the pendulum back where our Founding Fathers originally intended it to be.

Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) was a drug-fueled rock concert-cum-multimedia art event where layers of mediation mixed with immediate experience: The Velvet Underground performed their innovative music in front of films of themselves performing, Factory Superstars danced and performed poetry, various Warhol films projected on the walls, flashing lights flickered on mirrored surfaces, and a crowd of spectators – both famous and unknown – packed in to see and be seen, to dance and trip into the early hours of the morning. The experience of the EPI was a potent combination of alienation, mediation, and commercialization. The EPI was a promotional vehicle for Warhol, Warhol's Factory crew, and the Velvet Underground, but is also a complex example of spectacle that has been under-analyzed in recent scholarship. The EPI's unabashed emphasis on marketing, packaging, consumer goods, and empty celebrity are all manifestations of fears of late capitalist excess, but beneath the veneer of vapidity was an undercurrent of counterculture political activism and social awareness. Original contributions include cultural analysis, interpretation of contemporary reviews and reports, examination of the event's lack of art historical presence, and incorporation of music scholarship into the Warhol historical canon.

Much has been said about what artists experience when they make visual art individually, but less has been said about what artists experience when they make art together. The study is based on the author’s perception, elaborated below, that artistic co-creation in the visual arts seems to be regarded as less valuable than individual artistic creation. To explore and richly describe the experience of artistic co-creation from the perspective of artists themselves, I initially invited three duos of artists to create visual art together in an experimental, time-bound co creation. After the onset of COVID-19, however, I amended the study by inviting participants to co-create art by virtually passing pieces of art to one another. I then interviewed them about their experience. Guided by a phenomenological approach, I conducted semi-structured interviews using questions sourced from the study purpose and related research questions. These interviews, held periodically through the co-creative project, sought to uncover the emergent themes of the experience of artistic co-creation. After reviewing the transcripts from these interviews, I created a representative written likeness of each duo experience, called a portrait, using the qualitative modes of portraiture. Six themes emerged from these portraits in the ways the artists reflected on their experiences of creating art together, including: moments of relationship and connection in the process of co-creation, the context and structure of the experiment, seeing experiences differently in the process of co-creation, finding agreements between the perspectives of the co-creators, developing creative rhythms based on temporal parameters, and learning in the partnership of the project. I did not begin this study with a formally-articulated conceptual framework, but I was influenced in my thinking by Basquiat and Warhol’s relationship and subsequent collaborative artworks. This research contributes to the literature in key areas by examining existing assumptions about the value of artistic co-creation in the visual arts.

Baseball's Steroid Era put many different high-profile athletes under pressure to explain steroid allegations that were made against them. This thesis used textual analysis of news reports and media portrayals of the athletes, along with analysis of their image repair strategies to combat those allegations, to determine how successful the athletes were in changing public opinion as evidenced through the media. The contexts, media reports, and strategies of Jason Giambi, Mark McGwire, Andy Pettitte, and Roger Clemens were analyzed and revealed important implications involving effective use of image repair strategies. They provided a deeper framework for the success of mortification strategies. An authentic, sincere mortification strategy has more power to change the media's reporting and portrayal of the athlete, while stunted or incentivized mortification strategies provide diminishing results. The four different situations of the players and the different combinations of strategies used provide insight into how much a public persona matters in confronting allegations. They show how ineffective the strategy of minimization is against allegations that involve on-field performance. The situations reveal how the promise of future on-field actions, along with actual on-field success can help repair an athlete's image without a solid rhetorical strategy. They show the amount of information offered, along with the strategies used, influences the amount of persuasion that occurs. The different situations also showed how a complete image repair strategy is successful in ending news coverage of the allegations and not just changing the media portrayal.

This essay explores and compares the depiction of the character Beverly Marsh in Stephen King’s novel IT and Andy Muschietti’s 2017 film adaptation. The literary analysis uses the theoretical concepts of Mulvey’s the Male Gaze, Bartky’s sexual objectification theory, and Kristeva’s abjection. The Male Gaze describes how women are constantly looked upon by an implicit male subject, whether it be characters within the narrative or the spectator outside of it. Sexual objectification refers to how the body can become fragmented into sexual parts when described in an oppressive way. Feelings of abjection can occur when the concepts of subject and object, cultural norms, or sexual differences are challenged. The initial hypothesis was that King’s novel would lean more on patriarchal structures in the way femininity is described. However, the results show that both the original novel and the film depict Beverly in a sexually objectifying way, although the methods differ.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the concept of an individual who hangs an exhibition poster from Moderna Museet on their wall and shares it on Instagram. Questions regarding what that individual wants to tell the audience about themselves, their individuality and lifestyle, through sharing it on a public forum have been the main topic. The material was an image of a poster from Moderna Museet in Stockholm (an Andy Warhol exhibition from 1968) hanging inside someone's home. The picture was found amongst Instagram-posts that had been tagged to connect with the account @modernamuseet_butiken. At the basis of the analysis is the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu concerning capital, taste, beauty and museums. The method was a qualitative social semiotic approach that began by looking at the material on a denotative and connotative level, before branching out to the social semiotic level by applying the theoretical framework. The research found that through the content it is possible to make strong connotative readings concerning the person's education, background and awareness of art and art history. A conclusion is made concerning Bourdieus work in a modern day, which says that it is possible to use it to get a fundamental understanding, but it is at the same time important to approach the theories critically, because of the fact that the lines between different social classes are getting more blurred.

One of the first Czech research papers on self-publishing. Even though unsuccessful and forbidden authors could publish a book on their own in the past, the current phenomenon of self-publishing can be arranged on-line in just a few clicks and for much cheaper. Self- publishing began to spread since circa 2005 - in the Czech Republic and abroad simultaneously. This thesis shows how the development has unfolded differently in the Czech Republic and in the USA, which is considered the cradle of this technology. The first chapter of this thesis analyzes the history of book publishing and many different ways to publish a book, and defines self-publishing. The second chapter shows how the new technologies and media influenced the expansion of self-publishing. The third chapter analyzes and puts into context some of the Czech and the American self-publishing portals, and compares the providers of these services. Many professionals - editors, authors, and literary critics - criticize self-publishing for its amateurism and low quality content, which this work takes into account as well. This paper also documents some of the rare cases of self-published authors, who managed to succeed despite the tough competition from traditional publishing houses. In the last chapter the whole process of self-publishing...

Summary: The thesis comprises from the introduction and five main parts: three of them are published papers, the rest two are manuscripts prepared for submitting to the scientific journals. The first two are published phylogenetic studies of the cichlasomatine cichlids based on (1) molecular characters, and (2) both morphological and molecular data with the description of a new genus Andinoacara. The third (3) is the already published description of the new species Andinoacara stalsbergi from Peru combining both morphological and phylogenetic approaches and including the detailed phylogeny of the genus Andinoacara. The next unpublished manuscript (4) is the more detailed comprehensive phylogeography of the two non-relative genera (including Andinoacaras) of the trans-Andean cichlids. Including all valid species from the majority of their distribution areas it was reconstructed the ancestral area of both genera in the Choco region, Colombia, and revealed the directions of their distribution spreading. The last (5) unpublished manuscript is the phylogeographical study of the cichlid genus Serranochromis from the headwaters of the totally unknown Central Angola. It showed several evidences of the faunal exchange among the adjacent river systems. Lastly, the thesis is supplemented by several appendices...

<p>The aim of this thesis is to study the Swedish art field during the 1980s, from the perspective of the artistic production of Lars Nilsson. During this decade he became one of the most well known young artists associated with postmodernism.</p><p>The thesis is divided into three parts, where the first part examines different influences and aspects of the art of Lars Nilsson, as well as the contexts he was a part of. This is performed through a chronological as well as a categorizing presentation, based upon different exhibitions where Nilsson participated during the 1980s.</p><p>In the second part the subject is the Swedish art field, and how Lars Nilsson came to be part of a a new established category of a young generation of artists, mostly born in the 1950s, who were associated with youth, postmodernism and contemporaneousness. This part also puts attention to the importance of Lars Nittve, then art critic and curator, in introducing postmodernism, as well as establishing this new categorization of artists in Sweden.</p><p>The last part of the thesis studies four different group exhibitions, and how they all exemplify how "a younger generation of artists" were to be connected with notions of postmodernism and contemporaneousness through curatorial practice. Lars Nilsson participated at the thirst three of these exhibitions. This is followed with a last group exhibition, where the idea of younger artists as <em>the</em> most contemporary were to be questioned. The thesis ends with a summary and a discussion.</p>

La venue de l'Internet a modifié le statut du texte, notre approche, nos méthodes de lecture et nos modalités de compréhension. En devenant numérique, le texte s'est ouvert à de nouvelles possibilités: il est devenu malléable, interactif, hyperlié et fragmentaire. De fait, une autre approche de lecture est exigée, une lecture aléatoire, saccadée, non-chronologique et hypermédiatique. Le lecteur ne parcourt plus un texte stable, mais navigue dans les eaux mouvantes composées de mots et d'animations, de vidéos et de trames sonores. Afin de rendre compte de cette réalité, l'étude suivante propose l'analyse de trois oeuvres littéraires hypermédiatiques en vue de dégager les particularités de cette littérature, mais surtout dans l'optique de cibler la manière dont le lecteur expérimente l'oeuvre par une lecture que nous qualifions de « lecture en hypermédia ». Les oeuvres du corpus, soit Perte de temps, de Julie Potvin, Principes de gravité, de Sébastien Cliche, et Inside: A Journal of Dreams, d'Andy Campbell et Judi Alston, ont été choisies en fonction de la présence d'une figure de la perte émergente, tantôt symbolisée dans la reprise d'un poème de Baudelaire, tantôt représentée par la figure du livre à l'écran. Nous verrons qu'il se dégage un imaginaire de la fin annonçant la venue d'une nouvelle pratique, la lecture à l'écran, qui s'expérimente à travers un parcours labyrinthique dont la perte est incontournable et l'oubli nécessaire, afin de comprendre le sens qui se dégage des oeuvres. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Littérature hypermédiatique, Lecture, Remédiatisation, Figure, Perte.