Quit Copying Me!: Why We're All Upset About Copyright

In Good Copy Bad Copy, the directors of the film study what makes borrowing and sharing in the music and film world so taboo, along with whether preventetive measures are useful or even necessary as the world makes advances in technology. They interview a variety of producers (the old lady talking about the rap group, directors (dude with nice voice), and copyright lawyers (met the president) who all make their cases as to the state and necessity of copyright law. The film states that there are some important things to consider when approaching copyright law: the old copyright laws are outdated, and the use of old copyright laws allows for people to be arrested and convicted of minor infractions. Carolyn R Miller wrote in her article "Genre as Social Action" that genre is used to create new ideas from the combination of old ones. Jim Ridolfo and Martine Courant Rife write in their essay "Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study on Strategies of Rhetorical Delivery" that works that are created in the public domain are allowed to be repurposed.

Ridolfo and Rife cite the case of a college girl who had created an outdoor snowball fight to draw attention to her protest, and how her university had taken pictures of her and used them for the front page of their website and for admissions advertising, without the context of the protest (225). While cold, both writers agree that the university's reinterpretation of the student's images was in line with copyright law, stating that the student was releasing a creative work in a public space and therefore freeing it to be used ("When Maggie engaged in a protest in a public space—a physical commons, open to public view at a public institution—the argument is very strong that she had little right to privacy." (231)) So why do some creators get in trouble for using obviously public works? The documentary cites the example of The Grey Album, a mashup of works by the Beatles and Jay-Z. Despite its intense popularity, it was frowned upon by the Beatles' company, and Danger Mouse had to cancel distribution. Danger Mouse's stated reason for creating the album was as an art project (9:21), and it was released for free on the internet, so the Beatles' company and Jay-Z's company cannot say that Danger Mouse made the album to make money. Ridolfo and Rife claim that "as long as there is a relationship between the image used and the story, the newsmaker will be protected"(235). The relationship in this case was simply the remix of the music, and combined with the fact that the Beatles' works are very public, Danger Mouse should have been protected. However, due to the outdated copyright laws, the album had to have its distribution cancelled.


Another argument that the documentary had presented was the case of de minimis and Dr. Dre's song with NWA. It contained two seconds of music that was sampled from another song, and the song itself was so open to the world that people recognized it by its opening chords, as demonstrated at 4:39. Clearly, the song was in the public domain, as Ridolfe and Rife would argue (231), and something new was created out of the sampled music, as Miller would debate (152). However, Dr. Dre and NWA would be sued by the lawyers of the song's producer. The documentary argues that the sampled song is even hard to hear, and hard to identify in the actual song itself that the context might as well be changed(6:12). This would be considered 'de minimis' in a court of law: so insignificant that the courts wouldn't even bother(6:28). However, the courts ruled that it was illegal to take any sort of recording from a work (6:52), unless it was licensed (7:23). This greatly hurts creation in the music industry: all works are derived from other works, and licensing is lengthy and expensive.

But the most powerful thing that I took away from this film is that copyright law may be outdated. Lawrence Lessig said this at 24:15, during the sequence when he and the directors of the documentary are exploring a video library. He was previously explaning the basics of Creative Commons: an artist chooses how much they want to share of their work and how it can be shared, and if anybody wants to do more with it, they take it to the creator to discuss it. However, Creative Commons has not caught on completely yet, and copyright is in place instead. It makes a scary sort of sense: the laws that are in place now helped protect companies that otherwise would have been intellectually stolen from, but nowadays, do they really have to worry about a kid who samples two seconds of a song on his mixtape, or a grandmother who records her grandchild dancing while music is playing in the background? Lessig offers an alternative to the copyright debate: Creative Commons, which allows creators to choose the level of sharing that they want to attribute to their work. Says Lessig, "Creative Commons is giving artists a simple tool so they can mark their creativity with the freedoms they intend it to carry...It's important that they're making a choice about which freedoms they want to associate with their creativity." (22:14-22:27) Essentially, artists can pick and choose on what level of sharing that they want, so that one person can take a picture and make nice edits to it, while another will be prevented from reappropriating the picture into one with an antisemitic message. Miller offered something similar in her essay "Genre As Social Action", when she wrote that "The dynamic "fuses" substantiative, stylistic, and situational characteristics. The fusion had the character of a rhetorical "response" to situational "demands" perceived by the rhetor." (Miller 152) Essentially, she is saying that the genre is shaped by people to represent and depict commentary about the world today. The documentary offers Creative Commons as one of the alternatives to copyright, one that allows creators to share and users to reinterpret as willingly as they want, without having it escalate to court over sampled bits and pieces. Miller offers genre as something that is remixed to create social commentary. While copyright law doesn't follow that idea to the letter, Creative Commons does, which allows for the creation of new projects and ideas through the use of old ones.