A Renaissance: Enabling the Meta-Culture

-- By JulianAzran - 8 Apr 2013

Prior to the invention of the printing press, the Catholic Church exerted de facto control over the spread of culture and ideas in Europe. The sheer speed and ease of the printing press shattered the Church’s monopoly over written texts,

Monopoly over written texts is not correct, and does not capture the nature of the power being exercised.

paving the way for individual thought and democratic ideals.

Replace the printing press with the personal computer, and the Catholic Church with the Viacoms and media conglomerates of the world; we are now at a similar crossroads over the control of ideas and expression. Modern technology has given rise to a remix culture; the question is to what extent we will allow copyright laws to prevent this renaissance.

The conclusion came too fast. There is an analogy to draw, and in my writings and speeches I often draw it, but the "similarity" may be deceptive. After all, the very idea "copyright law" has no relevant corresponding concept in the prior historical setting.

Read-Only to Read/Write

Lawrence Lessig has said that we are now in the process of becoming a read/write culture after having been read-only for over a century. Rather than just passively listening to music, watching movies and reading books, people are now re-contextualizing these cultural artifacts in ways that give rise to a meta-culture. These meta-cultures are using other peoples’ works as a shared language to connect with others. The 50 Shades of Grey book series was developed from a Twilight fan-fiction website, where users post their own stories using the characters and themes from Twilight. Hip-Hop music was created by DJs who used snippets of other peoples’ songs to create new ones. These are two ways in which people are speaking with the transmissible entities that they have gleaned from pre-existing cultural artifacts.

Of course, this is not a novel idea. Remix or meta-cultures have existed in different forms of folklore for centuries, and have long been an integral part of how people have communicated with one another. The difference today is that cheap digital technology has removed the barriers that previously prevented people from directly engaging with preexisting cultural artifacts. Prior to the early 2000s, without a large budget and an abundance of free time, it would have been impossible to do this or this. This type of remixing is wholly different from the remixing that Disney engaged in, when it created animated movies based on stories in the public domain.

Maybe, maybe not. Disney's activity is somewhat like Shakespeare's and is in other ways not like Shakespeare at all. The analogies are helpful only if they show us how to understand what is happening now in a more powerful way.

Creative Control

Copyright does not incentivize creativity; it allows artists to control how their works are used even after they have been widely disseminated. The question is how much control do we want to give the original author? For much of the twentieth century, we gave artists almost complete control over how their works were used. For the average consumer, this regime was not an issue for the most part, owing to technological limitations. But technology has now advanced to the point where remixing has become an integral part of American culture.

In some places "artists" had control, but mostly "artists" were employees whose work was done for hire, and it was completely alienated from them: they had no control. Copyright law was mostly about the latter form of cultural production and distribution, while it pretended wherever possible to be about the former.

So to the extent that there was a power struggle going on before, and there is still a power struggle going on, the word I least understand in your preceding paragraph is "we."

Piracy vs. Plagiarism

How can we change copyright to allow this new remix culture to thrive? Obviously giving artists tighter control over their works is not the answer, but neither is abolition of all restrictions. Artists must be protected against outright piracy.

Why do "artists" have to be protected against sharing? Owners have to be protected against sharing. Artists do not usually have to be protected against being enjoyed.

But there is a difference between piracy and plagiarism. Piracy is when I send a Jay-Z album to a friend, plagiarism is when I take a Jay-Z album and mash it with Beatles songs. These two concepts therefore should be separated into distinct regimes of copyright governance.

This is facile. What is your name in this limited vocabulary for adding small bursts of bits to a bunch of previously copyrighted Jay-Z bits and sending the result to your friend?

This will continue to allow artists to make money selling their works, but will also allow the public to remix those works without having to seek someone’s permission.

Solutions

The Creative Commons are a step in the right direction, but its fatal flaw is that the system is voluntary; only those who want to allow others to remix their works will register with the Commons.

They're not "registering," they're just licensing on different terms. They aren't any different than any other licensors, and there is plenty of utility in the world for non-compulsory licenses. Free software and Wikipedia have already both changed the world by making different licensing terms and creation workflow easy for people.

In order for remix culture to reach its full potential, giving the public remix rights must be mandatory. Up to this point, the fair use doctrine has been limited to protecting parodies and educational uses. In addition, there is much confusion as to where a certain remix stops becoming fair use and shades into the realm of unauthorized reproduction. Some of this confusion can be attributed to the nature of the test itself, which involves a four-part analysis. Instead, I suggest ignoring three of those questions and simply asking ‘what is the “effect of the [remix] upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work?’”

So that major improvements to works remain prohibited, and ineffectual or aesthetically displeasing derivative works may be circulated without payment of royalties? To what end?

Such a clearance house would not be unprecedented. Since 1978, The Copyright Clearance Center has overseen the licensing of photocopy reproduction rights. It manages the rights for almost 2 million print works and represents thousands of publishers and writers. It handles over 1 million licensing transactions each year while operating as a non-profit, by taking a small percentage of the revenues it collects.

And?

This would be an effective way to protect both original authors and remixers because most remixes do not displace the market for the original work; therefore the original author is not deprived of customers. The Grey Album is not displacing the market for the White Album. Nevertheless, it was the Beatles’ label, EMI, who sued Danger Mouse, the remixer. EMI’s stance could actually be counter to its own interests in seeking to maximize sales of its music catalogue. Indeed, the online release of the Grey Album led to a peak in sales of the White Album. Remixes, thus add to the visibility of the underlying work, without undercutting the original authors’ pecuniary interests.

Moral Rights

At this point some would ask, ‘doesn’t the author have a right to control how others use their work?’ Moral rights seek to preserve the integrity of the work by protecting the work from alteration, distortion, or mutilation. That might be true for an artist who wants to protect his paintings, but in a digital age, these concerns are not as relevant. The original work can always be preserved, but the owner should not be able to exert control over the alteration of copies. If I take a book and cut the pages into snowflakes and sell them, the author should not be able to stop me. After all, no one interested in reading the book would choose to buy mutilated pages rather than the book itself. Why should a songwriter be able to prevent me from remixing his song?

Conclusion

If we change our copyright policies in this way, remix culture will thrive and people will be able to connect in new ways via their shared language of culture. Perhaps this might even allow entire cultures to communicate with each other, in unprecedented ways.

These are interesting, mostly half-baked, ideas in a jumble, replacing one form of argument for compulsory licensing regimes with another.

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