How is music appropriated and recirculated on the web, across different claims to authority over its movement? Complicating broad accounts of online ‘piracy’ or ‘sharing’, this paper explores rules of appropriation and recirculation in the field of archival hardcore blogging, in close readings of blogs that try to reconstruct a system of regulating principles and regulated practices. In relations among themselves, bloggers claim (and quarrel over) a non-proprietary ‘custodial’ authority over the music they post, which supports a range of privileges from attribution to exclusivity. Relations between bloggers and property-holders reveal intricate entanglements of different forms of authority (rather than straightforward oppositions between discrete logics of gift and commodity) – in which bands and labels might appeal to subcultural credibility in the same breath as legal copyright. While drawing on concepts of norm and gift that emphasise and valorise the sociality of appropriation, this paper insists on the ambivalence and contestation across different practices of appropriation, and between practices of appropriation and property – recovering an intricate interrelation among the legal, economic and social lives of musical works.

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In recent Federal Communications Commission reviews of media ownership rules, television writers unsuccessfully campaigned for a prime-time set-aside for “independent” programs. This article approaches the campaign as a structured negotiation of writers’ industrial authorship, which exploited institutional contradictions across the field while also betraying instabilities in the concept of independence itself.

After her termination as a Friends writers' assistant, Amaani Lyle filed suit for harassment and discrimination. In response, writers defended their professional authority over the writing process, facing two related tensions. First, Lyle v. Warner Bros. emphasized frictions between artistic freedom and social responsibility, amid concerns about a lack of diversity among writers. Second, the case also spotlighted the ambivalence of writers' artistic status, within a collaborative and vertically integrated system of production. Focusing on problems of organization and profession, this article explores writers' negotiations of these tensions as negotiations of their role in a complex industry.

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