In a comment to my earlier entry on Next Generation Media, Elleme2 asked what the difference was between "Remix Culture" and good old fashioned plagiarism.
This is a valid question, and it starts to open up a whole 'nother discussion which I'm not qualified to lead, involving sampling, fair use, copyright, intellectual property and lawyers, so I would prefer not to go down the legalistic route and keep it to generalities if you don't mind.
In my non-expert opinion, the idea behind remixing other people's content isn't really plagiarism, since in most cases, you're building on another person's work, while crediting the source material, whether you're calling it homage, or sampling, or something else.
That's the idea -- what happens in practice may be a completely different beast, and we're still not addressing all the thorny copyright issues (hint: just because something is done for non-commercial use, doesn't mean it's not infringing on someone's copyright).
But anyway, a current example of remix culture, live and in effect, is the idea of music mashups, where two songs, preferably well-known songs of completely different genres, are mixed together.
A famous example of a mashup album is the Grey Album, which was a mashup of rapper Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles's White Album. It got pretty popular, until EMI, the record label that owns the rights to the White Album, issued a cease-and-desist order (though if you look around on the Web, you can probably still find it).
Interestingly, the material from the Jay-Z album had been freely released in acapella version, specifically for use in stuff like this. Sampling has a long history in hip-hop and rap; I guess this was a form of payback.
Anyway, making your stuff available for other people is as big a part of remix culture as using it -- take a look at the Creative Commons license, which is offering an alternative view of copyright, with an eye towards allowing others to build upon what an artist has done. It's the difference between "some rights reserved" and "all rights reserved."
By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm cribbing a lot of the recaps and links from Wikipedia -- not only because they provide fairly neutral accounts about all this, but also because it's convenient and I am extraordinarily lazy.
The issues of sampling and using other people's content are not that new. As noted, it's been a big part of hip-hop; for example, the Beastie Boys were pretty heavy users of samples (and this was before the days of permission and licensing for the use of samples). Nowadays, they're also offering up acapella versions of their songs for the personal use of remixers. (Another pretty famous example is when rocker David Bowie also offered up some of his material for remixers.)
Diving deeper into my pop culture memory banks, there's also a pretty famous sampling/fair-use controversy from the early '90s involving Negativland and U2, though honestly, I'm getting in way over my head when it comes to all the fair use, sampling, and copyright implications. Suffice it to say, even if your own intentions are pure, you still should probably take the wishes of the copyright owner into account.
The primary reason I started talking about remix culture was to get an excuse to talk about the remix of the Lazy Sunday video (a.k.a. The Chronic-What?-cles of Narnia music video), which I never got the chance to blog about when it hit the blogosphere in a big way in December.
You know that video -- with the gangsta-style rapping about cupcakes and Mapquest and Mr. Pibb and Red Vines (they're crazy delicious, you know)? The one that was going to save hip-hop? The one that was video bootlegged and so popular that NBC made it freely available on the SNL Web site, and as a free iTunes download over the holiday? (They're charging $1.99 for it now.) The one that was done by the Lonely Island guys, who were hired by SNL?
Anyway, two 10-year-olds, with the help of dad on the computer graphics, did their own remix of Lazy Sunday, called Lazy Monday [video link] -- check it out.
Whew. That was a long way to get from there to here.
In a kind of a postscript, Wil Wheaton (yes, that Wil Wheaton), says in his blog that SNL/Lonely Island's next digital short, 'Young Chuck Norris', is actually a ripoff of something a friend of his did.
And so it goes.
Thanks -- Joe
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3 comments:
That's not really what I had in mind, Joe. I'm not a "music person" so what you describe never even occurred to me. I was thinking more in terms of the written word--taking something someone has written and "improving" on it, then claiming it as your own creation. If the originator EXPECTS that to be done as with some of the songs you mention, or if it's a parody or adaptation with credit to the original, that's fine. But if not, it seems to me that "remix" and "sampling" are simply euphemisms for theft and plagiarism. To me, it's as much a matter of principle as of legality. As the makers of Cheezit say, "Get your own box."
(How about painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Does that qualify as "remix"?)
I can kind of see what you're saying, but I think it's different; I also don't think I'm explaining myself very well.
First off, remix culture or not, plagiarism is still plagiarism.
I'm trying to think of an example of a remix where it comes to text -- music & video is a little easier to conceptualize -- text doesn't lend itself so easily, as you mention.
The closest I can come up with in concept is 'The Wind Done Gone', which you might remember was a kind of retelling of 'Gone With the Wind', only told from one of the slave's perspectives.
There was a lawsuit from the Margaret Mitchell estate and an injunction. The suit was settled out of court, though, and the book is still in print, so the courts didn't get a chance to rule whether it was copyright infringement or not (check out the wikipedia entry on the book and case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone )
Also, now that I think of it, Tom Stoppard's play, 'Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead' might also be seen as part remix, since it draws on characters, scenes and dialog from Hamlet, yet takes it in a completely different direction while still working in the general framework of the original Shakespeare play.
Similarly, looking at examples from visual art, you might say that examples from pop art, like some of Andy Warhol's works, hark to an early form of remix culture. And of course, artists have been emulating other artists' styles ever since there was art.
I don't think anyone would try to argue that putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa would be a valid example of remix culture (well, outside of a few guerrila artists, maybe).
Thanks -- Joe
They'd better SMILE when they do that Chuck Norris thing, or he'll rip off their arm and beat them with it.
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