Culture, Remixing and Ideas
It’s called culture. We’re ten years old and stand on the back steps with our friends miming the latest pop songs. We’re twenty years old and we’re burning a mixed CD for our girlfriend / boyfriend to share something of who we are through the compilation. We’re 80 years old and we want to play Johnny Cash songs at our funeral…
Stanford professor and lawyer Lawrence Lessig released his latest book called Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy late in 2008 and this week it became available as a free Creative Commons download via Bloomsbury Academic. A pre-eminant authority in the ongoing copyfight debate, it’s finally great to grab a copy of this for my upcoming holiday reading list.
RIP: A Remix Manifesto offers up a strong perspective on the remix society we’re living in. Are we reduced to consumers of culture for the next century or more? Have we created a generation (or three) of criminals by default? At what point does the grey line between sharing culture and protecting artist rights work best for society as a whole? No single person or business should stand above the greater good of the society we share. In fact, we remix in society every single day – so are we all criminals?
The most significant case that’s run across my radar in recent times has been the Shepard Fairey v Associated Press wrangle over the Mannie Garcia photo used as a basis for the now ubiquitous Obama poster – HOPE. It points out to a lot of artists that fair use is a legal issue, rather than a God given right to grab. Also, Fairey himself has used copyright to cease and desist another artist, Baxter Orr, who remixed Fairey’s OBEY poster several years ago. Something which received a decent critique, by the way.
Another photographer, Jim Krantz, was the guy who took the famous Malboro Man front on shot of the rodeo rider on the bucking horse. He walked into the Guggenheim and found Richard Prince was exhibiting his work – Prince blows up advertising photographs to larger scale. In 2007, the New York Times asked If the Copy is an Artwork, Then Whats the Original?
So the Fairey case is one to watch. On the one hand we need to be able to re-use the stuff around us to experience and be involved in culture (as opposed to final consumers) and we need the real interests of artists and content creators to be appreciated in the copyright laws of tomorrow. The current state of lockdown is oppressive… it’s unsustainable… it’s about big business owning and keeping assets.
Another free Creative Commons download worth reading on the subject is Professor James Boyle’s The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Understanding what copyright was intended to achieve and how it has evolved to this current state is a critical part of seeing where the line should be drawn.
As for Fairey? Well I’m on the fence with that one nowdays because the case has pros and cons on both sides and I’m waiting to hear more from the courtroom. Perhaps it’s a line ball? As for DRM (Digital Rights Management) – even the lawyers admit DRM is the most reviled consumer technology of the market today.
