Copyright:The good, the bad and the ugly

Post #1

The film Good Copy Bad Copy gives the viewer a good understanding of copyright and file sharing culture. Dr. Lawrence Ferrara, the director of the music department in NYU has been involved with intellectual property and music copyright for 15 years. He goes into a brief explanation about sampling (3:10) which happens when Hip-hop producers and rappers take old beats and mix them in the studio. These rappers and producers as well as all the other people who sample mixtapes and audio clips are all at risk of infringement.

According to the copyright laws of the United States of America, Section 501:

Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122 or of the author as provided in section 106A(a), or who imports copies or phonorecords into the United States in violation of section 602, is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author, as the case may be.

Copyrighting can become a very sticky situation depending on who you’re dealing with. I thought that as long as you gave credit where credit was due there wouldn’t be a problem. But in the case of N.W.A.’s 100 Miles and Runnin' sampling of Get off your ass and Jam, the court decided that it’s not creative and it’s illegal to take anything from a recording. It was debated whether the case with N.W.A. was deminimis (insignificant offense). The three notes that were samples from the original song were so manipulated that the song seemed entirely different but as far as the law goes this was still considered a case of copyright infringement.

Remix artist, Girl Talk introduces his album Night Ripper (1:40) and on the inside he thanked the artists he sampled. Although he sampled all these different artists, he still felt as though his work was original and he made sure to give them all credit. His particular album gives me insight on the industry and how unoriginal everything has become. Nothing really belongs to anyone anymore because it’s all just a sample or a remix of a song that was produced years ago. Girl Talk’s success is dependent the success of all the other artists he samples. He wouldn’t sample the songs if he knew they weren’t popular and widely recognized by his fans or else his product would not sell. The industry lives of sampling and remixes but it isn’t until now that artists are blatantly copying the work of others and calling it their own.

The best example of how copyright law undermines everyone’s interest is “The Grey Album” (8:45). Musical artist DJ Danger Mouse was samples Jay Z’s “Black Album” and The Beatles’ “White Album” and created The Grey Album. But although Danger Mouse is sampling two different artists and their “original” work, I think that his music requires more creativity. He doesn’t just take a bunch of different songs to mix them together and call them his own. He takes the artistic approach of combining two completely different genres with artists from different eras to create a new type of music. Yes, it is still a remix and yes he is sampling of work of others but it is evident that he makes more of an effort to create a new stream of music different from what was originally composed. In the end, this brings up the question of who really owns what and what exactly is the purpose of copyright? 

Post #2

In 2005, Maggie was a student at Michigan State University. She was part of a protest on university grounds concerning fair trade apparel. Maggie was photographed and without her consent, the image was appropriated by the university for four consecutive years after it was taken (2006-2009). In Maggie’s situation, the primary areas of concern would have to be legal issues. This includes issues of free speech, privacy, orphan works, the role of the institution as parent, issue of publicity /contractual rights, and fair use. As well as the issues of intellectual property and copyright. Secondary concerns would be rhetorical strategies of delivery, rhetorical velocity and composition.

Essentially, what the university did was take the pictures that were taken of Maggie for her W.R.C. campaign and used for a different purpose. For the universities purpose, they tried to portray Maggie and her friends as “having fun in the snow”, when in fact they were activists in a social justice campaign against sweatshops. Their efforts were in convincing Michigan State Administration to join the Worker’s Right Consortium that certifies college apparel as sweatshop free. To do this, Maggie and her group wrote “W.R.C.” in the snow with their footprints and colored it with dye to get attention from the media. Their campaign was successful so this was not the issue.

The issue came when Michigan State University decided to appropriate her picture on multiple occasions for purposes of promoting the university. In 2006, the university used an image of Maggie from the protest in 2005 for advertising purposes on MSU’s website. Then in 2008, the university used her image as part of a major bulk mailing effort. This is where we run into rhetorical velocity.

Rhetorical velocity is a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text (e.g., a media release) based on how s/he anticipates how the text might later be used. The rhetorician theorizes how certain newspapers, blogs, or television stations may recompose and re-distribute the release both as and in other media. In thinking about re-composition and re-distribution as a complex multimodal strategy, the rhetorician also considers how the release maybe recomposed in ways advantageous or disadvantageous to the rhetor’s goals and objectives. ( Ridolfo & Rife, 2011,  p.229)

Not only did they directly appropriate her picture but they also remixed it and manipulated it for their own use that had nothing to do with its original purpose. Maggie never consented to any of this nor was she ever contacted by the university that her images were being used on their website.

Regarding the legal, ethical and conceptual issues related to Maggie’s case, there are some concepts that need to be dissected in order to understand why it was such a huge deal. As far as the appropriation of Maggie’s digital image, the issue of ownership rights comes into play. An image of Maggie although it might have been photographed by another individual is still partly owned by Maggie because it is a picture of a human body that belongs to her. Without Maggie, there would be no picture, which is why it is always important to get consent from a person when you are taking their photograph. It is not the fact that MSU used her picture for their purposes that were wrong, it was the fact that they never asked her for permission nor did they notify her of their usage.

Works Cited

Good Copy Bad Copy: A Documentary about the Current State of Copyright and Culture. Dir. Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. 2007. Web. http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/.

Ridolfo, Jim, and Martine Courant Rife. “Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study on Strategies of Rhetorical Delivery.” Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom. Ed. Martine Courant Rife, Shaun Slattery, and Dànielle Nicole De Voss. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor P, 2011. Web. http://wac.colostate.edu/books/copywrite/.