Good Copy Bad Copy

Good Copy Bad Copy brought up a lot of points about copyright law that I did not know about previously. I understood that there were issues with enforcing copyright law, especially in the age of the Internet, but there were a few things I was unaware of such as how issues within copyright law can destroy creativity in ways that don't benefit anyone. 

When attorney Paul V. Licalsi says at 3:35 that "If you are a hip hop producer and you're taking a beat from a recorded piece of music, playing with it in the studio and making it into something else, you're always risking being sued for copyright infringement," I was surprised to learn that such a common technique in modern music is actually technically  illegal. Licalsi goes on to say that making sampling illegal was a death knell for hip hop music. Hip hop is a genre of music that is very centered around remix and sampling. If sampling of all kinds is illegal in music, then how is hip hop to live on as a genre? This got me thinking about genres in the terms Miller laid out in "Genre as Social Action." Miller said that "Genres can serve both as an index to cultural patterns and as tools for exploring the achievements of particular speakers and writers," (165). I think hip hop as a genre attests to the cultural pattern currently taking place with the increased use of sampled music. It's hard to listen to the radio nowadays without hearing a song that in some way has a reference to a previous song. For example, Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" samples from Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back." While sampling is increasingly common, it is not necessarily new. In 1991, A Tribe Called Quest released their song, "Can I Kick It?" which began with a sample from Lou Reed's "Walk on The Wild Side." Hip hop is a genre that has always been defined by sampling and remixing. To prohibit sampling would be to prohibit hip hop and since hip hop is currently such a culturally relevant genre and genres of anything have a lot to teach about a society's culture since they are based in social action, sampling is obviously important to American culture at this point in time. Also, according to Miller, new genres are formed when a new typification proves continually useful for mastering states of affairs and enters the stock of knowledge so that its application becomes routine (157). The routine nature of sampling suggests that it has already solidified itself in the genre of hip hop.

Starting at 8:51, there is a discussion of DJ Danger Mouse's "Gray Album" which sampled "White Album" by the Beatles and "Black Album" by Jay-Z. DJ Danger Mouse was sued for creating the album without permission from the musicians he sampled from, and as a result he made not a single penny off of his wildly popular album. This served as an example for how copyright law sometimes helps nobody and only hurts people. The Beatles' publishing company prevented DJ Danger Mouse from making money off of his album, but thousands of people already had it and it didn't harm the Beatles or Jay-Z to have DJ Danger Mouse make money off of it. In this case, copyright law served nobody's best interest.  Prior to watching this film, i thought copyright laws were put into place to protect people and their intellectual property. Now I see how copyright laws can actually hurt people. This scene reminded me of a video  I watched in a different class last year that proved a huge amount of popular songs that span over several decades worth of music history and several genres are actually just using the same four chords in the same order. If everyone who used those four chords was sued and wasn't allowed to make money off of their songs, a lot fewer musicians would be making money. The use of remix and remediation spans across all genres of music, literature, film, art, etc. The knowledge that so many songs borrow from one another got me thinking about authorship. If all those songs have the same chords, then whose song are they all copying? If DJ Danger Mouse mixed together music from the Beatles and Jay-Z, whose album is "The Gray Album"? Is it DJ Danger Mouse's, or does it belong to the Beatles and Jay-Z? Or does it belong to their publishers? Does it matter who the author technically is? I think Barthes would argue that it does not. In "Death of the Author," Barthes calls for active readers (or in this case, listeners) and downplays the role of the author in the function of a text. In order to appreciate a song or an album for what it is, I think Barthes would argue that it doesn't matter who created it. Only the content would matter in order to fully appreciate the music as a text. Copyright law gets in the way of the appreciation of music because it limits the distribution of music with unclear authorship like "The Gray Album" even though the album clearly had a wide success and could have been even more successful were it not for the barriers it was confronted by. About 42 minutes into the film, a Latino techno producer mentions that he is a producer, but not a musician. He does not consider himself a musician because he is just piecing together pre-existing music samples to create new songs. He would then not consider himself an author. Is the person who created the original work the only author, or can a person who remixes recorded music into a new song still an author (artist)? This is a difficult question that really has to be left up to interpretation.

At 29:00, a man from Nigeria explained how the film industry in Nigeria differs from the film industry in America and how there is virtually no piracy in Nigeria because of the way their film industry operates. This helped me understand a possible solution for the issues in the modern American copyright system. We spend a lot of time griping about the problems with copyright law, but it isn't very often a solution is proposed. The Nigerian man from the film discusses how films usually come out straight to video in his country, so they are available to the public right away instead of the theater releases we do in America. The videos are also fairly cheap. No one would buy a pirated copy if it came out at the same time and cost the same amount as the genuine film. I'm not so sure if the American film industry could shift in that direction though since American films are usually much larger productions. This brought me back to Miller's statement about how genres arise when a new typification arises and is useful enough that it becomes routine. If the American film industry were to adopt the Nigerian style of film production and it were to work out positively, it could effectively become routine and sprout a new genre of film making in which piracy is drastically reduced.

-Kayla Goldstein