Cultural Logic of the Remix
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Transcript of Cultural Logic of the Remix
Overview
Web 2.0 and ‘remix culture’ The origins of the remix Creativity or piracy? A war of words The ‘mash-up’ Legal threats
harness/exploit the collective wisdom and effort of their users
harness/exploit the collective wisdom and effort of their users
trust and respect users, and treat them as co–developers rather than consumers
harness/exploit the collective wisdom and effort of their users
trust and respect users, and treat them as co–developers rather than consumers
are open to — and encourage — remixing, hacking and sharing, with permissive licensing, open standards and programming languages, freely available application programming interfaces (APIs) etc(O’Reilly cited in Allen, 2008)
Web 2.0
Democratising tools which throw the old rules into disarray(Lasica, 2005: 2)
N-Geners Demographic born between 1977-1996 First to ‘grow up in a digital age …
bathed in bits’ (Tapsoctt & Williams, 2008: 47)
Driven by a desire ‘for choice, convenience, customization and control by designing, producing and distributing products themselves’ (ibid: 52)
N-Geners
‘The ability to remix media, hack products, or otherwise tamper with consumer culture is their birthright, and they won't let outmoded intellectual property laws stand in their way’ (Tapscott & Williams, 2008: 52)
US ‘remixers’?
19% of online teens 18% of online adults
remixed content gathered from other sources into a new creation ○ (Lenhart and Madden, 2005)
The remix as cultural norm
Film The Phantom Edit Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation
The remix as cultural norm Fashion
The remix as cultural norm Art
Nick Út Banksy
The remix as cultural norm Video Games
The remix as cultural norm User Generated Content
Mash-up/mix compilations?Blog posts?Presentations?Photos?Machinima?AMV?Video?
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History: the origins of the remix
Part 1 – the ‘dub’
See also Matt Mason, 2008, The Pirate’s Dilemma for details
‘All any prime minister had to do to gauge the winds was to listen closely to the week’s 45 rpm single releases; they were like political polls set to melody and riddim’ (Jeff Chang, 2005: 31).
Arthur ‘Duke’ Reid:“King of Sound & Blues” 1956, 1957 and 1958
1962 – Jamaican independence 1964 – Reid built recording studio 1967 – The Paragons
Rudolph ‘Ruddy’ Redwood& Byron Smith
Part 2 – the ‘edit’
1972 – Botel club, Fire Island, New York
Part 3 – the breakdown
1967 – Clive Campbell arrives in the Bronx
AKA DJ Kool Herc
Creativity or piracy? A war of words
‘‘We might anticipate a new music based on reworking MP3 recordings pulled from the Internet . . . . In this respect, the Internet is more than just a means of distribution, it becomes a raison d’eˆtre for a culture based on audio data’’ (Riddell, 2001, p.341 cited in Shiga, 2007:
94)
Now?
The ‘mash-up’
http://www.myspace.com/djsunderland
http://www.mashuptown.com/2007/03/dj_sunderland_s.html
On WebCT
John Shiga, 2007, ‘Copy and Persist’
Good Copy, Bad Copy (2007, Denmark)
Legal threats
The ‘cult of the amateur’ (Carr, 2005) “mass culture provides the building
blocks for the stuff we create” (Lessig in Lasica, 2005)
Fair use/dealing
‘a culture of contempt for intellectual property’
IPI (2007): cost to the US music industry = $12.6 billion
Industry response
lobbying for legislative changes court actions education and propaganda campaigns technological means
For more info see Allen (2008) and Lessig (2004, 2008)
‘Piracy used to be about folks who made and sold large numbers of counterfeit copies. Today, the term “piracy” seems to describe any unlicensed activity, especially if the person engaging in it is a male teenager. The content industry calls some things that are unquestionably legal “piracy”’.Litman, 2000: 7-8
Original or derivative?
http://remix.nin.com/
Copyright law? Technological shifts Cultural shifts Legal shifts
If you were sued every time you accidentally violated copyright law in a single day how much would you owe?
DMCA Fair use/dealing
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
Conclusion
Less than 2% of works have any continuing commercial value (Lessig, 2004)
CTEA = Mickey Mouse act? ‘Rent-seeking’? Stifling creativity?
Questions Is the remix a cultural norm and if so, is it
under threat?
Is there any value or significance to the remix as a cultural practice?
Does existent copyright law restrict creativity?
Does copyright law go far enough?
Sources B. Alexander, 2006. “Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and Learning?” EDUCAUSE Review, volume
41, number 2, pp. 32–44, http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0621.pdf Peter J Allen, 2008, ‘Rip, mix, burn … sue … ad infinitum: The effects of deterrence vs voluntary cooperation on
non-commercial online copyright infringing behaviour’, First Monday, Vol 13, No 9, http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/269
N. Carr, 2005. “The amorality of Web 2.0,” Rough Type, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
Jeff Chang, 2005, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, St. Martin's Press J. D. Lasica, 2005, Darknet: Hollywood’s war against the digital generation, Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. Lawrence Lessig, 2008, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, London: Bloomsbury Lawrence Lessig, 2004, Free Culture: The nature and future of creativity, London: Penguin,
http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf J. Litman, 2000. “The demonization of piracy,” Proceedings of CFP 2000: Challenging the Assumptions. The Tenth
Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy (6 April, Toronto, Canada), at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jdlitman/papers/demon.pdf
Matt Mason, 2008, The Pirates Dilemma: How hackers, punk capitalists and graffiti millionaires are remixing our culture and changing the world, London: Allen Lane, http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book
T. O’Reilly, 2005. “What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
William Patry, 2009, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, London: Oxford University Press Simon Reynolds, 2006, Rip It Up & Start Again, London: Faber John Shiga, 2007, ‘Copy-and-Persist: The Logic of Mash-Up Culture’ in � Critical Studies in Media Communication,
Volume 24, Number 2, pp. 93-114 Don Tapscott & Anthony D Williams, 2008, Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changed everything, London:
Atlantic Books
Check this out
Larry Lessig, 2007, TED, http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html
Michael Masnick, 2009, MIDEM09, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njuo1puB1lg
