Remix Culture, Copy and Remediation

Virtually any piece of information can be found using Google while any video, song, or sports replay can be watched on YouTube. Though, with mass amounts of information comes an extremely vague sense of what one is entitled to use, reuse and/or distribute. It is this issue of copyright that has many individuals and corporations, the ‘owners’ of this material, up in arms over the appropriate reuse of media. Does media follow the same strain of thinking as the phrase “all publicity is good publicity?” This blog post looks at Canadian Copyright law and applies it too the burgeoning popular music remix culture in terms of a song’s recognizability and to peer-to-peer networking sites, looking at how power relations function

            Under section 3(1) of the Canadian Copyright Law, protection of all creative forms is given by protecting the right to authorship of one’s creation, reproduction, or performance of the creation automatically at the birth of the creation (Copyright Act). If an external body wishes to reproduce or perform this work, they must seek permission or attain some sort of license to do so. Today’s music remix culture accounts for this law by seeking permission to alter and reproduce a song, whereby licensing of electronic songs are sold to other disc jockeys (DJs) allowing them the ability to create new material. In an article looking at the remediation of aspects from the Bollywood song Jaan Pehechaan Ho, David Novak discusses dubs, an altered form of reusing a song:

To dub is not simply to copy, but to grasp the thing you behold; to name it as your own. The dub juxtaposes subjectivities in a context of “familiar-but-strange” – the “hey, that’s me” moment of recognition, mixed with the awareness that it’s not quite so (2010:54).

The electronic music community has embraced this mentality with thirty-four year old Dutch DJ Armin Van Buuren breaking trail. As a pioneer of the electronic genre Trance, Van Buuren has many hit singles that are remixes that simultaneously evoke the familiar sound of the original and include his own style. Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt’s view on remediation of Hollywood movies in Bollywood, the song therefore is recognizable yet new: “when you take an idea and rout it through the Indian heart, it changes entirely” (Novak 2009:52). This is similar to Van Buuren’s stance in a 2002 interview, where he acknowledges he works around the original copy: “I see it as a painting, you know you have to use the sun in your painting but the rest is not defined yet, so you can basically paint anything you want” (Slomowicz 2002). Van Buuren’s appropriation is only dependent on what he wishes to create, a song that renders identification through, to use his example, the sun. Van Buuren’s original and remix tracks are situated amongst other artists in his weekly radio show that broadcasts to over fifteen million listeners in over twenty-six countries a week. These examples display the pervasiveness of remix culture and the acceptance and encouragement of recognizable-yet-different songs among electronic DJs and their willingness to participate.

            However, there are inappropriate reuses of media in the music scene, such as the illegal copying and distribution of music to those who have not paid for it. This has had record labels up in arms since the beginning of the peer-to-peer sharing network boom popularized by Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire. By copying songs from one CD of one album onto a peer-to-peer network, millions of people have access to what cost one person fewer than twenty dollars and record labels millions. Therefore, no monetary compensation will not be granted to the record labels in court by consumers because it is not cost effective and too time consuming to carry out. Similarly, artists will not immediately be financially compensated by record sales, as they depend on their album selling. The pie chart above details approximately how much money goes into each album in production, marketing, shipping, pressing, and other stages of manufacturing. Apple has attempted to circumvent the system by attaching passwords to songs sold on the iTunes store. Once songs move from the iTunes account where there it was purchased, a password is required to listen to it. Though Apple has created a solution to solve their own method of copyright protection, this does not halt an individual lending a music CD purchased at a local music store to a friend for them to copy, nor does it stop the transfer of files to the Internet.

            From these examples, we can draw some commonalities in appropriate reuses of media, the first of which is of the utmost importance but often goes unnoticed: give credit where credit is due (usually coming in the form of money). However, what happens when bands like Radiohead offer to release albums for whatever price consumers wish to pay as long as it is more than the credit card handling fee? Do we give credit by attending their live performances or creating Radiohead cover bands? The issue of profiting from another’s work is another problem that is dealt with sufficiently in remix culture by selling licenses to artists that wish to remix the song. YouTube has developed its own way of prohibiting media that infringe copyright laws by hiring individuals to troll the servers manually, taking down videos that are improperly reused. Though, with the continuous expansion of the dot-com era and the dissemination of media so far reaching with the click of a mouse, these principles will need to be constantly restructured to meet the needs of the society. Therefore, a start in creating some systematic guidelines that apply to the reuse of media would include issues of ownership and property, consent of usage, and credit given to the makers in a pre-arranged form, be it money or public recognition.

References

Copyright Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42)

Novak, David

2010  Cosmopolitanism, Remediation, and the Ghost World of Bollywood. Cultural Anthropology 25(1):40-72.

Slomowicz, Ron

2002  Interview with Armin Van Buuren. About.com Guide. http://dancemusic.about.com/cs/interviews/a/IntAVBuuren_3.htm, accessed March 28^th, 2011.