copywrongs
apophenia (danah boyd - former BACHer!) has a great article about copyright and media.
The thesis is that copyright issues that arise in remixed, reworked, re-expressed media are issues of communication, not piracy. In a world in which we are constantly inundated with (copyrighted) media, our culture picks up and uses this pervasive media as reference points, as shared commonalities: we quote movie lines, song lyrics, etc. Look at a newspaper's headlines - a fair chunk of them, especially in the "lighter" sections, are puns on cultural references. As our means of communication expand through multimedia tools, we can "quote" using source material.
If Big Media then jumps in and claims copyright infringement, why then We Are Being Silenced. They are the pusher who won't let the user... eh, I don't know where this metaphor is going. But culturally, we have become dependent on the media to express firstly our communal, cultural issues (in The Drama of the Year), but also, later, to express ourselves individually through references to shared experiences, medial experiences. The form of this individual expression (spoken word, mix, video collage) should not make a difference - copyright lawyers think otherwise.
The solution, obviously, being unique, media-independent expression. Cutting yourself off from the dealer, to return to a metaphor that I still don't know how to fix.
The thesis is that copyright issues that arise in remixed, reworked, re-expressed media are issues of communication, not piracy. In a world in which we are constantly inundated with (copyrighted) media, our culture picks up and uses this pervasive media as reference points, as shared commonalities: we quote movie lines, song lyrics, etc. Look at a newspaper's headlines - a fair chunk of them, especially in the "lighter" sections, are puns on cultural references. As our means of communication expand through multimedia tools, we can "quote" using source material.
If Big Media then jumps in and claims copyright infringement, why then We Are Being Silenced. They are the pusher who won't let the user... eh, I don't know where this metaphor is going. But culturally, we have become dependent on the media to express firstly our communal, cultural issues (in The Drama of the Year), but also, later, to express ourselves individually through references to shared experiences, medial experiences. The form of this individual expression (spoken word, mix, video collage) should not make a difference - copyright lawyers think otherwise.
The solution, obviously, being unique, media-independent expression. Cutting yourself off from the dealer, to return to a metaphor that I still don't know how to fix.
posted by stella at 11:08 PM
3 Comments:
this raises the question of whether it's a good thing that our culture is so self-referential. there's something to be said for cultural products that derive their aesthetic value largely from within, rather than endlessly sampling like some annoying name-dropper at a party. often quotes are used for no greater purpose than to provide a measure of winking in-crowd flattery to those who recognize it. take a pop-culture-reference punch line on a sitcom or "the family guy", for example.
but so what, so i heard that album, or saw that movie too: i don't want to be pandered to, i want to be stimulated.
the same goes for other forms of communication, especially conversation -- i find that too often, movie/TV quotes are used to substitute for, rather than supplement, real communication. they're a crutch against banality, i suppose, but usually end up failing this purpose.
this has been on my mind ever since i read a funny & fascinating (fictional) interview with a fungus that won the economist's essay contest last year and touched on this point. it explores the "fungal" (macro) view of human history and mentions the stupefying effect of self-referential media towards the end.
Thanks for the article/link - it's a great one.
Though it's not directly in the article, an image of mushroom circles popped into my head: fungi that to us look like individuals, but are actually part of the same one organism, connected underground. This image somehow translated into one of quoting and memes between humans - perhaps it demonstrate the same connectedness among humans (or lack of individuality, if you will), that we are incessantly relaying the same bits, using the same vocabulary (made up of phrases, not words).
Communication isn't primarily about creativity; that's the reverse of danah's point, that these 'cultural products' aren't about creativity, but communication. Relatively rarely do we communicate in order to get new information across; generally, it's a social activity, marked by redundancy and bullshitting. This is where 'in-crowd flattery' is comes into play, where quoting is purely a social marker. Sure, it's not real communication, but how often does that sort of conversation happen? Human beings are such defensive little buggers, it's sometimes a wonder it happens at all.
Also, I think it's not clear that our culture is becoming more self-referential or more dependent on sampling than before. It just used to be Shakespeare, or in Latin, or the Bible. Here the social marking becomes even more evident - if anything, quoting has just become more prevalent today because more people have more access to more media.
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شركة نقل اثاث في الرياض هي شركه متخصصف في خدمة تخزين الاثاث وتتمتع بخبرات واسعه في خدمة نقل وتخزين الاثاث
وتستخدم كل مالديها من معدات والات حديثه في نقل وتخزين الاثاث لضمان وصول كل قطعه سليمه للمكان المرغوب
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تغليف الاثاث بالشكل السليم وباجود الخامات المستورده للحفاظ على الاثاث
تنزيل الاثاث على ايدى متخصصين
نقل الاثاث عن طريق احدث سيارات نقل مغلقه ومخصصه لنقل الاثاث
اوناش رفع الاثاث التى تحافظ على الاثاث من الخدوش والتجريحات
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