De minimus and creativity versus the industry

“Good Copy, Bad Copy,” documents various perspectives revolving around rhetorical velocity, which Ridolfo and DeVoss define as “the strategic theorizing for how a text might be recomposed (and why it might be recomposed) by the third parties, and how this recomposing may be useful or not to the short or long-term rhetorical objectives of the rhetorician.” (Ridolfo & Rife, 240)  

For my generation, the issues regarding copyright in pirating music/movies is shrugged off.  The content we want is easily accessible, easy to use, and free.  All you need is a BitTorrent, like uTorrent, and you can download just about anything you want from websites that provide torrent files and magnet links, such as Kickass Torrents and The Pirate Bay.  Almost everyone nowadays (at least in a college campus community) has access to both a personal computer and the Internet.  And if downloading isn’t possible, streaming movies and TV shows is just as popular, if not more so (especially in a college environment where a good portion of the population lives in residence halls provided by the university).  People can access free music through accounts with Pandora and Spotify, but this is even taken further with YouTube.  As a result, this generation has grown up valuing as much open access as possible, and is even regarded as important enough of a topic for the EWM major here to focus on.    

Therefore, while watching “Good Copy, Bad Copy,” the analysis of Dr. Dre’s “100 Miles and Runnin,’” I’d come to a personal conclusion that it really wasn’t a big deal.  At 5:13, it is revealed that two seconds are taken from “Get off Your Ass and Jam.”  The documentary goes on to define de minimis as something that “the law isn’t concerned with insignificant offenses.” (Good Copy, Bad Copy, 6:40)  A major moment occurs at 6:55, however, where someone from the music industry says, “Many would say it is de minimus.  But it is not.”  During this moment of the documentary, I was exposed to an entirely different line of thinking- that this was a “riff,” and that, at least according to the people involved with the big corporations and industry, something small like that was considered stealing.

Another major moment occurs at 31:10 when the documentary builds an understanding of the Nigerian film industry.  Living in the United States, I’ve mostly been exposed to Hollywood, and its big industry policies.  It was a major cultural shift learning about another film industry, best encompassed by the ideal put forth in that moment: “This economy has required our own unique method of creating motion pictures.”  The pirated versions of the movies produced there cost about the same as the “genuine” copies, and they come out at around the same time- therefore, the issue of open access isn’t quite the same as the dilemma faced in the US.  The more localized industry puts the emphasis of the crime on the situation, rather than on catching individuals.  Another poignant idea based on this philosophy occurs at 30:35: “Copyright is not about stopping people from using your work, but getting them to use your work legally and giving you money for what they’ve done with your work.”  At least in the Hollywood industry, it feels like this ideal has been lost, or perhaps never even existed in the first place.   

Towards the end of the film, the audience gets a taste of the popular Brazilian musical stylings of Tecno Brega, where a third moment of revelation occurs.  Besides the documentation and exposure of a different genre of music, the audience is also given a quick overview of how the genre is created (something I’m certainly not familiar with).  The issues of copyright are basically seen as a non-issue for the producers of this kind of music.  Like Girl Talk, they utilize different blips of music to fit different sections of a song according to beat and tempo.  The self-proclaimed producers don’t take on the title of musicians, and they don’t see any money made from their music.  They simply create, produce, and make their music available for distribution.  The only money that’s made in this business is in the street vendors.

After viewing this documentary, I have a better understanding of the dilemma of de minimus, creativity, and the money-making industries that are looking for some sort of “retribution,” particularly in the music and film context.  As English majors, we tend to focus on copyright in the sense of publication of literature and other written materials, but we need to acknowledge technology’s role in spreading and creating other “properties.”  Our culture is a reflection of the copyright culture we live in, whether it’s the younger generation fighting for the right to creativity, regardless of property ownership, or the (typically older) side of the argument pleading for creativity of artists who maneuver around the industry legally through name recognition, paperwork, and paying fees.  However, this dilemma is present primarily for the biggest players in the context- determining that there is a problem, whether it’s in the current laws regarding copyright, or changing the environment rather than going after individuals, is probably the most important thing to recognize in this fight.  Consumers like me are just going to continue to consume, but the way they consume, or if they consume, is always going to be both a reflection and a result of the competition between these two parallel ideas.  

~Jasmine Spitler