In Lawrence Lessig’s “Remix”, part one has touched base on the transition from old media to new media culture. Lessig, an established writer, lawyer, and professor (whose personal site is blacked out today, perhaps in protest of SOPA) discusses the cultures of our past, and how media was created and distributed compared to methods used today. Lessig states that it is in our nature to remake what has already been made, and if what’s already been made has been made from things past, everything is more ore less a ‘remix’ in and of itself.
What was interesting about Part One of ‘Remix’ and Lessig’s discussion was the mentioning of several YouTube videos that were pulled from the site due to Copyright claim, including a cited video by Lessig including a dancing baby filmed by a mother with a Prince song playing faintly in the background. After X-amount of views on their video, the parent company of Prince’s song rights pressured YouTube into taking the video down. But why? Was the mother profitting off of the portion of Prince’s song in the video? Were people downloading the video as a .mp4 file, inserting it into Audacity and extracting just the music file for their own personal library? Doubtful. This reminds me of a video that I uploaded to YouTube for my AP English class in High School that was one hundred percent for educational purposes but it was taken down due to a song I used in the video that was prohibited for whatever reason.
The point I am trying to make is why do record companies bother with small cases such as the YouTube-baby-dancing-to-prince-video, or my own video, when they can be dealing with matters that actually affect their revenue stream, or better yet, accept the fact that this is the type of culture we live in today and exploit it as much as they can. The money and efforts used by many of these companies could be allocated towards much better projects for the good of not only their company, but for their fans as well.
Lessig also brings up artist Greg Michael Gillis, or better known as his stage name, Girl Talk. Being a fan of electronic music, I understand that most of the final product that I hear in electronic songs are not original compositions by any means. The nature of this genre, and a skill that Girl Talk has mastered, is that many of these popular songs are sampled from other songs. Should Girl Talk pay loyalties to every single artist he has sampled and does he request permission from these artists in the first place to include their samples in his tracks? The answer to both questions is likely no, but instead of trying to fight artists who are expressing their creative rights, these record companies need to acknowledge that Girl Talk’s tracks and his audience are vastly different than that of their individual artists and his sales are likely not detrimental to their artists’ sales of their own records.
Personally, I am sympathetic towards artists that are attacked by copyright lawsuits over small discrepancies and the only way I would support a record company’s stance on the issue is if an artist is blatantly copying another individual’s work without giving it proper credit. I’ve included a series of links that highlights this exact issue with artist(s) Leona Lewis and international DJ Avicii. Avicii had created a track entitled “Penguin” (which was in itself sampled from the Penguin Cafe orchestra, hence the title) and Leona Lewis released her track “Collide” which had the exact same instrumental as “Penguin”. No credit had been given to Avicii whatsoever until a series of Twitter updates, Facebook posts, and YouTube comments pressured Lewis into giving proper credit to Avicii.
Avicii and Penguin Orchestra Sample
Avicii Penguin:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7BGxDbH9Zo
Leona Lewis Collide (P.S. Note all the dislikes on her video? Those are from the initial protest to her video from Avicii fans)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7sG2Ebnn6A
Bibliography: http://www.archive.org/stream/LawrenceLessigRemix/Remix-o#page/n1/mode/2up