Copy control

HIGH NOTES

Building on the music of others can be a creative enterprise.

Despite it not being an entirely new debate, the recently released documentary, RIP: A Remix Manifesto (available online for free) once again has people like me thinking long and hard about the implications of traditional copyright in music. If the film has a protagonist, it is Greg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, who a short while ago gave up his day job as a biomedical engineer to focus on his fledgling music career. A career that he has, unusually, built on the music of others. Girl Talk is a laptop DJ who has bucked the somewhat traditional trend of music making by creating music through “mash ups”: a less overused term than “remixes”, but one which implies more or less the same thing, except for the fact that mash ups are songs created entirely out of combinations of two or more existing works of music. Like artistes before him (The Avalanches being a personal favourite) Girl Talk does this brilliantly. But there is a catch.

 

Traditional copyright law anywhere in the world would suggest that artistes like Girl Talk would have to acquire the necessary rights from music publishers and labels before they can release or even perform any of the music that the companies legally own. In the case of Girl Talk, who used approximately 300 samples on his last album Feed the Animals, it would have been impossible for him to release his music using the “legal” route, for two reasons. First, it would cost millions of dollars in licensing fees to acquire the rights to use the songs, and, second, a lot of the songs would possibly never have been approved for usage anyway. And so he uses the more un-traditional route of releasing the album utilising the “fair use” clause in the US copyright act, which allows for the use of copyrighted material in the form of samples so short and small that they do not affect sales. But, in doing so, Girl Talk opens himself up to copyright-infringement lawsuits aplenty.

And so we come to the very broad question, popularly posed by Lawrence Lessig, US academic and founder of the not-for-profit Creative Commons: do copyright laws choke creativity? Girl Talk and The Avalanches were successful in releasing their music commercially, but that was not the case with Dangermouse, whose Grey Album was forced to become a file-sharing phenomenon.

But copyright restrictions might never have stopped any of them from going ahead and making their music anyway. Therefore, can copyright control creativity? Especially at a time when content creation is more of a two-way street than ever before, and when the top-to-bottom logic doesn’t work any more, due to abundant online publishing platforms?

At this point it is blatantly obvious that copyright bodies do not have the upper hand and, whether they choose to get more restrictive (if they can) or not, artistes like Dangermouse will continue to create music, and be successful doing so. It’s up to traditional copyright entities to accept this reality and work towards defining a middle space that aids creativity and does not strangle it, because rigid restriction might — as veteran music manager Peter Jenner points out in the documentary Good Copy Bad Copy — jeopardise its future.