The Right to Remix

[andrewducker]

Should I be allowed to cut up a book I bought and paste the bits back together in a different order, for my own amusement?
Should I be allowed to cut up a book I bought and past the bits back together in a different order and show it to my friends?
Should I be allowed to cut up a book I bought and past the bits back together in a different order and then sell those bits to someone else?
Should I be allowed to distribute instructions to other people on how to cut up their book and stick it together in the way that I did?
Should I be allowed to make a machine that could cut up a book and stick it back together in a specific way and then sell/give this machine to others?

To reframe some of those:
Should I be allowed to remix music for myself?
Should I be allowed to remix music for my friends?
Should I be allowed to give my remixes away?

Now, of course, there's a fundamental difference between music and books in this case - if I give away the transfigured book then I don't have it any more, if I give away the remixed music I still have the original. So performing remixes for my friends and giving them away is violating copyright which, all arguments notwithstanding, is currently illegal. However, this doesn't apply to the last two.

Should I be allowed to tell other people how to remix their own music?
Should I be allowed to write a program to remix other people's records automatically?

Take, for instance, The Grey Album, in which The Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album were mixed together. Releasing this was obviously illegal - but would it be illegal to release a piece of software which, when fed both albums, automatically produced the remix in real-time by playing parts of each at the right time? I can't see any way in which you could argue that it would be - if it's permissible for a person to remix their own music, how can there be a problem with the computer doing it for them.

And yet, this is exactly what Clearplay are being sued for. They produce a DVD player that, when playing a DVD, will automatically edit out any obscenities, nudity or excessive violence. The Director's Guild of America are deeply unhappy that someone would edit their movies. Except that nobody is editing the movies - you can take the film out of the DVD player and stick it in any other player and it plays just fine. You can even turn the filtering off in the players (or set it to a variety of different levels) - the choice is down to you.

A couple of years ago a similar thing almost happened with Windows - Microsoft wanted to introduce smart-tags that would automatically add links to pages in Internet Explorer that pointed to useful definitions. The problem being that Microsoft would decide which definitions to use. Of course, there'd be ways to turn this off, but Microsoft being a monopoly and most users being technically terrified the chances are that people would stick with the default. And this would mean that when you accessed someone's writing it would be modified by Microsoft before you saw it. People were up in arms about this and Microsoft backed down. But should they have done? Shouldn't the user be allowed to edit text on it's way from the server to their browser? After all, I do much the same myself - turning off Flash animations and freezing animated GIFs before they can appear. Is there really a huge difference between that and automatically modifying the text before it's displayed?

Do people have the right to do this? Can they take a work of art and change it in any way they want? Can they use any tool they want to shred, remix, resculpt or otherwise transmogrify copyright works for their own ends? And if so, considering that modern computers have such incredible power that they can seamlessly re-edit in real-time, doesn't that mean that artists have lost control over what other people can do to their work?

Comments

[happylizardboy.livejournal.com]

There's an avant-garde book which has loose leaf pages: when you're finished with reading it, you are supposed to shuffle the pages before putting the book back into its box. A copy was once stopped at customs because there are holes in the pages which let you see what happens later in the book. The custom agent presumed that something obscene had been excised.

Our first act as readers and viewers is to re-interpret what is presented to us. I have written and published work in the public domain and the only thing that has ever concerned me about protecting my work is whether I have received some kind of vague credit. If a person can take something I have produced and make something 'better' using it, then they probably should. I would, however, like a little credit for picking the palette they have painted with. This, by the way, is an easy position to take when the market hasn't given what you produce any value yet. :)

I think artists and writers should be given praise, and appropriate payment, when due. But what I do with their work after they've finished is frequently completely out of their hands and the way we think about an artists 'rights' needs to consider that. How many times have I altered a novelist's story by telling a friend only about the one chapter that I really liked? How many plays have I distorted by only referencing one scene in an academic paper? How many ideas have I misrepresented by taking them out of their original context and trying to plug them into another with only a footnote? I'm supposed to do those things more or less every day.

Hmm..

[derumi.livejournal.com]

With regards to the DVD playback, I imagine you can argue that contents of the DVD are being reproduced and broadcast in a form not intended by the copyright holder, albeit in an intangible form.

[gomichan.livejournal.com]

Cro-Magnon shaman, staring at cave wall: Maaaaan. This sucks.

Apprentice shaman: What does, teach?

Shaman: I just realized. We do this painting here? It stays here.

Apprentice: We don't do it, the antelope don't come.

Shaman: Yeah, but anybody could come along and mess with it. They could put, I don't know, extra horns on all the animals, we could get busted-ass antelopes next year cuz somebody messed with our painting.

Apprentice: Guess so. But what can you do.

Shaman: We could make somebody guard it, I guess. Or like, beat up anyone who came near it, or something.

Apprentice: *thinks for a while* Sounds like a big pain in the ass, teach.

Shaman: *ponders also* Heh, yeah, I guess. Fuck it. Someday somebody'll come up with a solution. Hand me my yellow ochre.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

It's a perpetual fannish problem: that some newbie fans will take someone else's work (story or songvid) and - because they can - stick it up on another website with their name on it instead of the original maker's.

With stories, the issue is quite clearcut: the writer has copyright, and it's yet to be proved that fanfiction is actually illegal. (With songvids, the issue is slightly less clearcut, since songvids constitute the same breach of copyright law as you describe with remixes.)

Still, the fannish method of policing such impoliteness is the same in either case: notify everyone that it's happened, with evidence that the story was yours before it was nicked and put up on a different website with someone else's name attached, and ask people to ask the website owner to take the plagiarised story down. Often the plagiarist seemed not to have realised (or said she didn't realise) that there was anything wrong with claiming someone else's fanfiction as if it were her own. Mass mailings from outraged peers soon convince her either that it is wrong - or that she'd better not do it again.

The issue with professionally-produced music and novels is that the original writer deserves both the profit and the credit - whereas in fannish situations, the original writer has no profit to defend and is merely after her just credit.

I have read several funny versions of Pride and Prejudice, one of which was mostly achieved by search-and-replace on the original, plus some editing. (Spike was Elizabeth. Buffy was Darcy. And so on.) Jane Austen and the Gutenberg Project were both given full credit, and there was no profit to be infringed upon. I would have ben rather more dubious about a similar project with a novel by a living author - but I read and enjoy Harry Potter and Vorkosigan fanfiction, which are definitely based on the books.

I think the three issues are this, in order of importance:

1. Is the original creator, whose work is being remixed, given full credit as the creator?

2. Is the new work taking just profits away from the original creator? (This does not apply to situations where no profit existed for the original creator, obviously.)

3. If the original creator is alive, are they okay with this? If they're not okay with this, is the remix a parody? (You are allowed, in text anyway, to make a lot of use of the creator's original work if what you're doing is a parody of the original work.) I think that both morally and legally there's a lot of reasonable latitude given if your intent is to mock the original because you think it's mockworthy. But if you like and admire the original work, and intend to produce something very similiar to it, then I think if the creator is alive, you're morally obligated to check if they're okay with you messing around with their work. (Though I did do something very odd with one of LeGuin's stories on livejournal, and I didn't ask her permission, but OTOH I did it to pose a literary question, not with the intention of passing on my version of her story as either hers or mine.)

I'm thinking in terms of text, of course, not music. I don't know how you'd go about creating a musical parody...

Thoughts

[ekatarina.livejournal.com]

I was trying to put my finger on what I saw as the difference between the "cut book" and the movie editing thing.

If I take a book, cut it up, add things, and paste stickers in it, I have created a work of art, and while I used another book as a source and therefore must give them credit, I have created something new and I present it as my creation derived from something else.

The movie editing thing does, in a way, create something new, but it does not proport to be something new. It presents itself a the movie, not a new creation derived from the movie as source.

*That* is the problem. As the core of plagerism is someone presenting something else as their own. In this case the editors are presenting something altered, but not re-created or re-invented in some interesting way, as the original. It is *not* the original.

Just as you cannot take credit when it is not yours, you cannot give credit to someone else.

That is as far as I can think about it right now.

Ekatarina

[biscuitware.livejournal.com]

a fantastic debate. i agree with you andy. I press pause and i've altered the way in which the original author intended the product to be viewed.

if i want to remove obscenties in films which sometimes (and let's be fair here) usually have no link to the actual plot - then let me remove them.

I watch some "family" films and they say the f-word a lot. Okay, so I use the f-word every day, but I hate seeing in films when it bares no context to the plot and I certainly think we should be restricting some content if only to protect minors.


On slightly similar note. Think back to when you were at school. Were you aware of the f or c words? I wasn't - yet kids nowadays routinely say these words and I think it's appalling. We can only put the blame on film makers for using these words so frequently and out of context.

~that is all.

[nirikina.livejournal.com]

No comments on other people's views, but here's some more information. I'm a cross-stitcher, and I'm pretty certain about part of the copyright law about derivative works. If you alter or cut and paste someone else's work you can't claim it as yours and you can't distribute it without permission from the original author(s) either. A derivative work is when you create something that you couldn't have created without someone else's work, however small a part. One cross-stitch autohor I know of is happy for some of her work to be used in this way as long as it is the instructions for the changes to be shared, with the public still having to purchase the original pieces in order to create the new derivative.