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?":
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.
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.
Mark Dery on Orphan Works (Print)
Previously on BB:
• EFF on why artists should support the Orphan Works proposal
• More posts on Orphan Works
