Remix: Good or Bad, Black or White? Who Knows?

Early on, a man presents the notion and issue of intellectual property (8:13). This is an important subject, but the biggest problem with it is that it is so abstract. Creations of the mind are powerful things that make up the essence of civilization and everything we know as a society. It was the human mind that created the automobile, penicillin, and Netflix. Not that all of these are remixable. Actually, now that I think about it, anything can be remediated. The first car that went on the market was the Ford Model T. Today, there are probably thousands. (Couldn’t find a clear answer to exactly how many.) Penicillin led to the discovery and development of additional medicines, which may have use penicillin’s chemical makeup as the basis. As for Netflix, there are spin-offs like Hulu and Amazon Instant Video, but I don’t know which came first. Either way, the point is the same! Two (maybe three if there is a prototype) of these are revisions of the original online-television idea that has taken the world by storm.

My question is this, though: is the system of intellectual property essentially a first-come-first-serve basis? Surely two people can come up with the same or similar ideas around the same period of time and attempt to patent their design or copyright their words. One of the more relevant examples today is the battle between Apple and Samsung, in which Apple has blamed the latter for trying to copy the iPhone’s overall appearance and certain features, therefore “committing” piracy.

This leads to the next point about copyright that got me. At 16:24, Dan Glickman (chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.) says, “We know that we will never stop piracy.” My instinctive response was to think Well, then why make downloading illegal? I almost laughed at my ignorance, then. Artists, designers, engineers, and inventors would make absolutely no money if everything was free to download or duplicate. I just couldn’t help but think of how simple it would be if it was allowed. Of course, then there would be other problems like the fact that thousands, if not millions, of jobs would be lost. I suppose I have never thought long and hard about it, but copyright is such a gray issue that it’s not surprising that we’re still having disputes about it after years of back-and-forth debate and court cases. It seem like one of those things where you’re like, It’s 2015. Why haven’t we resolved this?

The man at 23:36 also brings up an interesting analogy. He says that, being an author of college textbooks, he understands that kids take them and do “all sorts of junk with them,” but he doesn’t want to file a federal lawsuit against them. He believes that once a text is “out there” it should be able to be used and reused freely. He highlights that the purpose of copyright is to protect you from having another person compete with you and sell the original text. This helped me to see that as long as the originator receives credit and some kind of considerate compensation, copyright is really rather limiting. It makes me wonder what else the world has up its sleeve that we haven’t seen/will never see because of copyright laws and the financial barrier between an individual and receiving permission to remix.

            This helps me understand textuality as a dilemma. The word itself is all about and for communication and exploration, but if it has restrictions that curb creativity and distribution, what’s the point? Bakhtin says, “Understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other” (Bakhtin, 282). If this is true, in order for readers/consumers to comprehend what they read, watch, and hear, there has to be some sort of action they participate in. In theory, it could be simply sitting back and replaying whatever it was in their mind, asking themselves questions, and dwelling on certain scenes or moments in a song, but it is much more constructive to take part in a functional activity. (For example, class discussion after a video or a remix to a song.)

            Shifting focus to Ridolfo’s and Rife’s article, the word “delivery” itself is actually best described by the term “rhetorical velocity,” because it is a “strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text based on how s/he anticipates how the text might later be used.” These terms are used heavily in comparison to Maggie when Ridolfo and Rife describe the wrong conveyance that Michigan State University uses regarding the picture of Maggie in the snow. Appropriation, or misuse, is then directly connected to the delivery, especially in the case of Maggie and the photo manipulation, because it represents the remixing that the university did without permission. Bringing up the rear of the terms is recomposition. The main utilization of the term in the article is in regard to the future and how one can anticipate it, but I feel like it is, again, an extension of the previous terms used, as it can assume an extremely similar connotation. I think “appropriation” functions most importantly in the article, partly because it is the word with the closest definition to what the body of the text is about – the case and why it’s an issue. The term that surprised me the most was “rhetorical velocity.” I had never heard of the expression before and it takes into account how the release could be recomposed in ways advantageous or disadvantageous in relation to the rhetorician’s goals, which I thought was interesting!

Ridolfo, Jim, and Martine Rife. "RHETORICAL VELOCITY AND COPYRIGHT: A CASE STUDY ON STRATEGIES OF RHETORICAL DELIVERY." N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans.

         Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-422.