Each time we change formats, there is a struggle for control over media. In the midst of this struggle, styles shift based on the materiality of the medium.
With the invention of the record, recorded music, particularly jazz, was distributed across the country because it was very portable. This allowed jazz to be brought to the But with this new medium also came certain restraints, including recording time limit and less spontaneity and improvisation in their music.
The physical characteristics of cassette tapes made recording and duplication much easier than it had in the LP era. Because of this, the distribution and spread of music became even easier than records did. This was especially important for Hip-Hop. The tape era also allowed for the first popular sound collage using other artists’ prerecorded material.
In the 1990s, it was very easy and cheap to create a CD. Now, most PCs have CD burners, making anyone who owned a PC a potential provider with this format. This allowed many performers to go into the business themselves. Now, record companies could be bypassed with the ability to create your own CD with technology you owned.
In art, certain images were repeated over and over again throughout the years. Here we see EdouardManet’s update on Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In Olympia, Manet has transformed the ideal nude female into a modern day (around the early 20th century) prostitute in Paris.
Here we see Marcel Duchamp taking things that had been made by someone else, subtly transforming the work, before signing it with his name. The first image is a reproduction of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Duchamp took this reproduction, gave the Mona Lisa a goatee and added the letters L.H.O.O.Q. (which is a pun on the French pronunciation of the letters, translating into “She has a hot ass”). In the other image, Duchamp took a urinal, signed R. Mutt (a pun on the name of the company who made the urinal), turned it on it’s side and called it art.
What better example of someone who tookworks from the public domain and remixing it into something different than Walt Disney. Many Disney classics are stories taken from the public domain and changed significantly, including: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and Mulan.
You can even think of the Declaration of Independence as a “remix.” When writing this document, Thomas Jefferson compiled other people’s thoughts about the rights of humans because a healthy public domain existed at the time. This proves that a large public domain effects culture outside of the arts, such as law, and even science and medicine.
This is Lawrence Lessig, who you may remember from a video we watched in class about copyright law, is a professor at Stanford University. He specializes in intellectual property law. He is also on the board for the creative commons, an organization that has created an author’s alternative to the copyright law.
My thesis is that copyright law needs to change, particularly for how music is effected by this law. There needs to be a change so that it allows for fewer limitations on creativity, but still respects the author of the copyrighted work. Copyright law originally encouraged creativity, not hindered it. We need to allow the law to evolve with technological changes. At the very least, there needs to be very clear guidelines to what is and isn’t allowed, especially under the Fair Use clause. This lack of clarity could fix a lot of the hesitation to create works for fear of breaking the law.
