Mark Dery on the copyfight
Cultural critic Mark Dery, whose provocative work we've featured on BB, took a break from ruminating on bottom-feeder weirdness to write an equally insightful piece for Print magazine about copyright law and the Orphan Works Act. Mark wrote me, "Nothing says 'pulse-pounding, bubbles-in-your-blood, white-knuckled excitement' like copyright law." Seriously though, as Cory has posted before, the Orphan Works legislation is very, very important. From Dery's Print article, titled "Does the Orphan Works Bill Mean Copyright Chaos?":
Previously on BB:
• EFF on why artists should support the Orphan Works proposal
• More posts on Orphan Works
Swimming beneath the surface of the copyright debate is the shadow of something more profound: our cultural shift from an understanding of creativity as something indelibly individual—a notion that held sway from the Romantic 19th century through the Modernist 20th—to the post-modern sense of a more collective creativity, one that expresses itself through his-torical allusion, cultural quotation, and aesthetic appropriation. When Holland says that “creators who use orphan works are usually remix artists, who can’t create without appropriating the work of others,” he’s implying that works inspired by other works are somehow more exalted than works composed of other works.Mark Dery on Orphan Works (Print)
By contrast, advocates of radically deregulated copyright such as Lawrence Lessig, the author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, argue for what they call “remix culture.” In a 2001 article in Wired magazine, Lessig wrote, “Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse.” Of course, Holland points out, there’s a difference between inspiration and appropriation.
Clearly, the tangle of copyright law that constricts the public domain and criminalizes noncommercial remixing—that recut Star Wars video or music mash-up you just uploaded—needs detangling. But, just as clearly, we shouldn’t trample the rights of the individual creator in our rush to throw wide the gates of the creative commons. The right of copyright holders to determine how their works are used must be balanced with the right of fair use. The ability of the individual creator to profit from the sale of her work, free from infringement, is desperately important. But so is greater access to the orphaned works of artists lost in time.
Previously on BB:
• EFF on why artists should support the Orphan Works proposal
• More posts on Orphan Works
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Sorry I disagree - there may be a cultural shift, but it's not the one identified. The use of other works has long been part of literature - works have always copied and remade into other works. Shakespeare did this magnificently with both high and low brow source material. Classical Mythology, history and the Bible are so much part of the remix that is English literature that most Engligh lit curriculums require their study as a prereq. In the 20th century works like Finnegan's Wake made heavy use of bits of other material. The same stuff has always happened in art and music.
The main shift is in the medium, and in the easy and extensive access to so many different things we now have with the Internet.
I agree with Mark's comment - and was also wondering: is there supposed to be a link at the bottom of this post? Cuz right now - it ain't there.
Cheers.
Here's the link:
http://www.printmag.com/design_articles/orphan_works/tabid/419/Default.aspx
I don't think that what Dery is saying is disputing the fact that the sampling Markfrei cites has been going on for centuries, if not forever. Recent technology's just made the conditions for cultural production more apparent. The spectre of the Romantic artist creating masterpieces alone in a garret without any outside influence is a pervasive myth that we still attempt to hold onto.
If yr looking for more Dery, I highly recommend checking out "Memories of the Future: Excavating the Jet Age at the TWA Terminal." There's a lengthy excerpt here.
The key point is paragraph three:
"The historical roots of the orphan works imbroglio can be traced back to the Copyright Act of 1976. That year, U.S. lawmakers radically revised American copyright law to harmonize it with international law, which automatically granted copyright protection to a work the instant it is “fixed in any tangible medium of expression” (written or recorded). The author is not required to formally register it with a copyright office to get copyright protection."
There's your gorram problem. Fix *that.*
My org, Future of Music Coalition, has a nice fact sheet that examines the current debate about Orphan Works.
We also published a blog post that points out the weaknesses (and strengths) of the pending Orphan Works legislation.
And if anyone wants to go down the fair use rabbit hole in person, we're holding a public panel discussion called "Creative License: A Conversation About Music, Law and Fair Use," on Oct. 6 at The Public Theater in NYC.
I swear, I'm not propagandizing (we're a DC-based nonprofit that fights the power on behalf of musicians) — I just thought folks might find some of this stuff useful.
Carry on, then.
New Rap Song Samples 'Billie Jean' In Its Entirety, Adds Nothing http://www.theonion.com/content/node/32563
Contrasoma nails it. To be sure, Mark, much art---and we have to distinguish between tribal art, the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the Baroque (underwritten by the church, royalty, or wealthy patrons in the parvenu bourgeoisie), the modernist avant-garde (a not insignificant chunk of it sustained by the life support of private patronage of Ladies Who Lunch and trust-fund bobos)---has quoted from other works or borrowed whole plots outright or transposed recognizable figures from one masterpiece into another. There's a profound difference between anonymous tribal art that submerges individual creativity in the collective pool of recycled archetypes, icons, totems, and talismans. Arguably, the very notion of individual creativity only begins to materialize, in Western culture, with the birth of the individual. (Choose your historical startpoint; the Renaissance is a popular one. Bloom thinks Shakespeare invented the Human---the bounded, centered psyche as we know it. Your mileage may vary.) But reaffirming the collective culture by speaking the shared language of archetypal images, as tribal cultures do, is poles apart from Shakespeare's light-fingered appropriation of pre-existing plots---literary shareware---which, be it said, he uses as generic narrative scaffolding to create something rich and strange. And Shakespeare, in turn, is a world away from a historically omnivorous polymath like Joyce, who loots world literature to create something truly new under the sun: the first truly modern novel---punning, dizzily polyvalent, a mashup avant la lettre. And contemporary cut-and-paste artists---DJ Girl Talk, Modest Mouse---are engaging in a kind of techno-bricolage, reassembling the cast-off detritus of commercial culture into junk sculptures, whereas someone like Moby, on PLAY, is simply basking in blackness---ripping off Everything But the Burden, to use Greg Tate's felicitous phrase; grafting it onto the sleek chassis of white-boy chillout music; and riding it, on cruise control, all the way to the bank. So the motivations, here, are manifold. I simply don't believe you can elide the yawning cultural and historical chasm between, say, Shakespeare and Joyce; one is using classical plot devices because they're part of the open-source language every playwright is using, in his moment, and because they acknowledge the centrality of ancient Greece to Western culture; the other is miming the machine---creating a new novelistic paradigm better suited to the giddy speedup and information overload of the onrushing 20th century. And today's remix culture is, in some ways, technologically determined---ripping, burning, and remixing the world around it Because It Can, i.e., because the technology encourages it to do so, as does the economic logic of commercial culture and the cultural logic of the post-postmodern moment (or whatever this is), which is all about looting the past, or playing semiotic name-this-tune with appropriated fragments of other times, other places, other works.
Executive Summary: Yes, art has always digested other art. But it's happening on a scale, now, and to a degree, now, that's unprecedented.
Apologies for the absence of paragraph tags, which does tend to make the head explode.