(Good Copy Bad Copy, 7:28)
“If you sample. You license. Period.” The movement of sampling in 90s hip hop
brought up the idea of intellectual property ownership in music because it was
the inception of taking music that had already been created, and originally
developing something with previous tracks overlaid. There was originality, but
within a broader context of music that was
This seems to eliminate the consideration for the degree to
which music bears similarity. A point was made by Girl Talk about the fact that
people can take the same chord progression and bear the same amount of
similarity as a remix but don’t have to worry about legal issues, often because
the music was not directly ripped from a recording and was played originally
form another instrument by another person and recorded. This does draw some
complications in itself, because there have been lawsuits filed for a song
having a likeness to the degree that it constitutes “copying”. Most recently,
Marvin Gaye’s children recently won a suit against Robin Thicke for copying
“Got to Give it Up” on “Blurred Lines”. Some would say that the closeness would
constitute sampling. Because of this, copyright law is not necessarily biased
towards mixing, but because mixing directly rips form the recording, the entire
nature o a remix is predicated upon the likeness of sound from an original
track.
(Good Copy Bad Copy, 35:00)
If the record companies try to continue in the same business model, it will
only slow the development. No matter where a peer-to-peer service is shut down,
it will open somewhere else. The people have a problem with paying corporations
and won’t hesitate to share files over the internet.
The matter at hand is whether intellectual property is
legitimate, and if so, that it follows specific guidelines, whether those are
guidelines based on precedent such as material property law, or otherwise,
based on conclusions made with consideration to differences in circumstance
such as the digital medium. Advocates of strict copyright law concede to the
fact that the internet makes it impossible at this point to practically cover
all activity, not only because of the sheer volume, but the fact that the
activity crosses different countries with different copyright laws.
(Good Copy Bad Copy, 14:00)
We recognize we can’t ever stop piracy, and so the accepted solution is to get
people in trouble in a sort of scare tactic to minimize file sharing. Producers
estimate about $6 bln lost each year because of peer-to-peer file sharing.
Advocates are focused on the proliferation of the creativity
associated with mixing music while those against the unlicensed mixing cite not
only the precedence of copyright’s limitations in the context of owning what an
individual created. Even so, people are both for the proliferation of
creativity while also advocating limitation in order to allow that mixing of
music, but in a minimal way.
#2
By having a commons culture, as proposed by Ridolfo and
Rife, the commons culture would primarily serve to help the people who have
creative work that is either already made and can then be distributed legally
for entertainment, a well as opening the cannel for those who would otherwise
be inhibited to produce because of copyright law. There are several principles
that Ridolfo and Rife cite in opposition to this creative common culture. The “appropriation
of images and bodies” (Ridolfo&Rife, 230) is important to identify
according to Rife and Ridolfo because it’s so difficult to define the ownership
aspect. Legally speaking, the image and likeness of somebody would be
considered the property, therefore Maggie would have had to approve the use of
an image depicting her, especially or the purposes of promoting something. This
would be of primary concern because it most directly involves an individual and
negative implications that can sprout form unconsented use of their image and
likeness. Additionally, free speech and right to privacy directly concern the
individual in concern of defense. The reasonable expectation of privacy is the
general rule of thumb here, being that if the person has a reasonable
expectation that where they are should be considered private, they cannot be
filmed, photographed, etc. Overall, the primary concern is one of maximizing
the proliferation of creativity, while minimizing intrusion that would inhibit
that creativity.
Citations
1.
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 Danielle Nicole De Voss. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse and
Parlor, P, 2011. Web.
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/copywrite/.
2.
Good Copy Bad Copy: A Documentary about
the Curent State of Copyright and Culture. Dir. Andreas Johnsen, Ralk
Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. 2007. Web.
http://wwwgoocopybadcopy.net/.