The Legal Janitor

I love movies. I’ll die without music. I’m hooked on Internet games. SMS and emails - those are must-haves. My life is great because someone created all these stuff for me. Each time I reject piracy, I encourage creativity. All the better for me.

Even if we don’t consider questions as to why the hell email and SMS are included above, IPOS has presented a not only simplistic concept of the source of creativity, but also a potentially misleading representation of what copyright is all about.

For example, let us take a look at the example of American Edit:

Only 10 days after its release, the mash-up album American Edit, which pays tribute to the acclaimed Green Day album American Idiot through some of the best mash-up productions of 2005, was shut down reportedly after received a cease & desist order from Green Day’s label, Warner records, despite the fact that it was released as an internet only release with no commercial gain for the team of mash-up artists involved.

In fact, the only possible profit to be made from the release was a plea from the creators of the album (known only by the shared alias Dean Gray) for fans who enjoyed the creation to donate to one of three possible charities that Green Day have been known to support. Furthermore, the mash-up versions were such fantastic productions that they were truly a departure from the standard Green Day performances and would not compete for consumptive dollars.

Cory Doctorow says:

As I wrote earlier this week, fighting mashups has nothing to do with reducing “piracy.” No one who listens to American Edit will shrug her shoulders and say, “Well, heck, now that I’ve heard that, who needs to buy the Green Day album?” Censoring this art is tantamount to saying, “This music must go because it displeases us.”

The problem with the message from IPOS is twofold.

Firstly, they do not define piracy. In fact, there is no mention at all of piracy in copyright law. Copyright is a negative right. It prevents others from doing things to the work which are only accorded to the copyright owner. The main focus of copyright is to grant copyright owners a monopoly on the right to make copies of their works.

From this perspective, what does piracy mean? If piracy is any act of copying of a copyrighted work that is not authorised by the copyright owner, then every one of us is a pirate. We record shows to watch at home. We write things down to remember them, including song lyrics, poetry and various other cultural products. In fact, our memories themselves are copies. Do we have to seek authorisation from copyright owners to remember things?

Of course, such an interpretation is ludicrous. The law provides many exceptions to copyright. Chief amongst this is the idea that people who copy things privately do not infringe on copyrights. If you write down poetry or song lyrics in your diary, you do not infringe. If you videotape a show to watch at a time and place of your choosing, you do not infringe (although this is unsettled). If you remember things in your head, you do not infringe.

Clearly thus, copyright is not an absolute right. There are many exceptions. The crucial point about these exceptions however, is that copyright interests are protected only as far as it is necessary for owners to benefit from their works, without sacrificing the rights of consumers to do what they can with the products that they purchase. And indeed, that IS the main purpose of copyright, which is to encourage the production and dissemination of cultural products.

What happens however when copyright owners use copyrights to restrict, control and more importantly, censor cultural production?

This brings me to the second issue that IPOS fails to address. The assumption is that ’someone created all these stuff for me’. But what about the stuff that I create?

Cultural production does not occur in a vacuum. From Sophocles to Shakespeare, Elvis to Coldplay, creative geniuses throughout our history have borrowed, mixed, remixed and mashed up different parts of our culture and synthesized those elements into new cultural products. Elvis owes a huge cultural debt to the African-American slaves from whom he borrowed the blues.

The slaves themselves brought their beats and sounds from their tradition, from a time before they were pressed into indentured servitude, and infused them into the music and instruments of their slave-owners. Now in modern times, their cultural progeny have been enslaved in the same way that they have been, by copyright maximalist rhetoric that completely ignores the derivative, mimetic and transformative nature of cultural production.

The fundamental purpose of copyright is to ensure the creation and dissemination of new works. This means that copyright owners should have a time-limited monopoly to make copies of their works, or to authorise copies of their works. Of course I do not dispute the right of authors and creators to profit from their works: the street corner pirate-VCD and CD seller and their suppliers should be prosecuted under the law. But when copyright extends the right of owners to control and censor new derivative works, then we must remind ourselves what the original purpose of copyright is.

The prevailing discourse frames copyright from the point of view that the world is divided neatly into ‘creators’ and ‘consumers’. The fact is however, that the wealth of technological tools in our digital age have drastically lowered the costs of entry for the lay person to create new works. Anyone and everyone can create or synthesize, the only barrier remaining is the legal one preventing the average person from accessing the raw material for cultural production.

One-Eyed Tuesdays

I strongly believe that, especially in Singapore, there is no one to speak out against the misguided attitude of entrenched copyright interests, and thus someone must. Copyright maximalists do not support creativity, and instead seek to control and restrict it. I want to find people who create derivative works but are prevented from publishing those works due to legal restrictions.

Starting from next Tuesday, every fortnightly, I will feature any collages, mixes, remixes or mash-ups that are made using unauthorised sources. I would really appreciate it if people would submit their works for this feature. There are some minimum requirements:

1. The work must be made for non-commercial purposes.
2. Preferably under one of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses, but public domain is also ok.
3. Send it to me via my email address shianux[at]gmail[dot]com. Gmail restricts the attachments for each email to 10mb, so make sure it stays under that size.

If readers know any artists or musicians who do collages, remixes or mash-ups, do tell them about this feature and encourage them to send it in. We want to showcase works that have been censored due to copyright.

AmericanEdit.org: Dean Gray Tuesday via Boing Boing: Warners censors mashup album, fight back!