In my recent post on cliches and idfic, I casually said that I identify as a remix artist. It just occurred to me today that I haven't really said why that is
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My primary response to remix culture has generally been the acknowledgement that it's not anything new - if anything it's very old, pre-dating modern concepts of intellectual property and copyright. Shakespeare, as far we know, came up with two original plots in his lifetime - and it's a good chance that it's just that we don't have the source material for those two (Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest) any more
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My primary response to remix culture has generally been the acknowledgement that it's not anything new - if anything it's very old, pre-dating modern concepts of intellectual property and copyright.Yep. I think most remixers would agree with that. There's certainly been huge threads within fandom discussing that very thing. Jenkins talks about it in Textual Poachers too, if I remember correctly. What interests me about the history of remix (at the moment anyway -- it changes) is how it's existed side-by-side with print culture (and hence copyright culture), but it seems to have been kind of underground while the printing press and the academy ruled. And now here we are on the other side of that divergence in storytelling and artistic practice, thanks to another cultural revolution. I'm fascinated by how the two practices are smashing together (or not, as the case may be
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I think one place where we're going to differ is that I don't see a cultural revolution being here yet. There's smoke, but no fire. There might be a fire, and there might not - I think ultimately it's going to be up to how the large media corporations handle themselves over the next ten years or so.
The Shakespeare book is Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. It's published by Routledge (no surprise there). I bought it for Lear's Daughters, by Elaine Feinstein and the Women's Theatre Group, but the rest of the playwrights are well worth getting (Brecht, Fletcher, Heiner Muller, Garcia Lorca, et al).
I had an almost religious remix moment a few years ago when I went to see the SFMOMA exhibition "Picasso and American Art." There'd be an original by Picasso (or "original," since some of his own work is very remixy) and sometimes three or four remixes. By, you know, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenberg and Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock... I was so taken by it that I bought the book. In hardcover. For $60. That's how much it moved me. 8-)
One of my favorites was Lichtenstein's "Femme au chapeau," which is based on Picasso's "Woman in Gray." This picture doesn't really do justice to either of them, but *does* give an idea just how close the remix is to the original
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I am a fairly ardent supporter of non-commercial remixing and a firm believer that copyright has gone way, way, way too far. (Life of the artist + 70 years is completely fucking insane, and don't get me started on DRM either.) I have found fandom and fanfic to be marvelously mind-expanding; it's opened up new vistas to me and made me a much better writer and possibly a more creative person.
I also think that "remix" is the default state of human creativity and that copyright has forced us to buttonhole our creative impulses into an artificial straitjacket where there's a clear and very arbitrary line between "okay" and "not okay" -- you really get a sense for how arbitrary it is when you ask a fanfic opponent to explain the difference between fanfic and, say, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or The Mists of Avalon. (Not that they don't have answers; it's just that their answers don't make sense.)
But at the same time, to play a certain amount of devil's advocate:
Perhaps worst of all, the pro-IP side of the
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I'm actually really with you on the shades of grey argument (which is reflected in the Boyle book, for instance). The more I learn, the more ethically grey a lot of things appear to me. As you say, there are ethical distinctions to be drawn when it comes to what we remix, whether that's due to issues of appropriation, authorial intent, the law, community standards, the rights to 'free' speech and so on. But those issues are true for 'original' art too -- they are not unique to remix, you just smack into them sooner and harder if you remix
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Have you seen this article by Cory Doctorow? ...What I want to ask is, how did we end up with a copyright law that only protects critics, while leaving fans out in the cold?
Some background: copyright's regulatory contours allow for many kinds of use without permission from the copyright holder. For example, if you're writing a critical review of a book, copyright allows you to include quotations from the book for the purpose of criticism. Giving authors the right to choose which critics are allowed to make their points with quotes from the original work is obvious bad policy. It's a thick-skinned author indeed who'd arm his most devastating critics with the whips they need to score him. The courts have historically afforded similar latitude to parodists, on much the same basis: if you're engaged in the parodical mockery of a work, it's a little much to expect that the work's author will give her blessing to your efforts.
The upshot of this is that you're on much more solid ground if you want to quote or otherwise reference a work
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Thanks for the link. I had read the article, but enjoyed re-reading it. Isn't it odd how things keep coming back to passion, and how problematic our culture finds it? I blame the church. All that social programming they've done to make us scared of our own bodies and drives has created a huge mess, and I sometimes despair that we will ever fix it.
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The Shakespeare book is Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. It's published by Routledge (no surprise there). I bought it for Lear's Daughters, by Elaine Feinstein and the Women's Theatre Group, but the rest of the playwrights are well worth getting (Brecht, Fletcher, Heiner Muller, Garcia Lorca, et al).
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One of my favorites was Lichtenstein's "Femme au chapeau," which is based on Picasso's "Woman in Gray." This picture doesn't really do justice to either of them, but *does* give an idea just how close the remix is to the original ( ... )
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You've given me so much to think about, and your Picasso example has me very excited.
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I am a fairly ardent supporter of non-commercial remixing and a firm believer that copyright has gone way, way, way too far. (Life of the artist + 70 years is completely fucking insane, and don't get me started on DRM either.) I have found fandom and fanfic to be marvelously mind-expanding; it's opened up new vistas to me and made me a much better writer and possibly a more creative person.
I also think that "remix" is the default state of human creativity and that copyright has forced us to buttonhole our creative impulses into an artificial straitjacket where there's a clear and very arbitrary line between "okay" and "not okay" -- you really get a sense for how arbitrary it is when you ask a fanfic opponent to explain the difference between fanfic and, say, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or The Mists of Avalon. (Not that they don't have answers; it's just that their answers don't make sense.)
But at the same time, to play a certain amount of devil's advocate:
Perhaps worst of all, the pro-IP side of the ( ... )
Reply
Reply
...What I want to ask is, how did we end up with a copyright law that only protects critics, while leaving fans out in the cold?
Some background: copyright's regulatory contours allow for many kinds of use without permission from the copyright holder. For example, if you're writing a critical review of a book, copyright allows you to include quotations from the book for the purpose of criticism. Giving authors the right to choose which critics are allowed to make their points with quotes from the original work is obvious bad policy. It's a thick-skinned author indeed who'd arm his most devastating critics with the whips they need to score him. The courts have historically afforded similar latitude to parodists, on much the same basis: if you're engaged in the parodical mockery of a work, it's a little much to expect that the work's author will give her blessing to your efforts.
The upshot of this is that you're on much more solid ground if you want to quote or otherwise reference a work ( ... )
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