Remix culture

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Building blocks icon as symbol for remixing, proposed by Creative Commons and derived from FreeCulture.org.[1]
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig in 2008 describes the remix culture. The book itself is open for remix due to its availability under a CC BY-NC license.[2][3]

Remix culture, sometimes read-write culture, is a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new product.[4][5] A remix culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. Since the early 2000s[6][7] and in his 2008 book Remix, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig presents this as a desirable idea for the digital age. Lessig also founded the Creative Commons in 2001 which released Licenses as tools to enable remix culture again, as remixing is legally prevented by the default exclusive copyright regime applied currently on intellectual property. The remix culture for cultural works is related and inspired by the earlier Free and open source software for software movement, which encourages the reuse and remixing of software works.

Description

Lawrence Lessig described the Remix culture in comparison to the default media culture of the 20th century under usage of computer technology terminology as Read/Write culture (RW) vs Read Only culture (RO).[8]

In the usual Read Only media culture is the culture consumed more or less passively.[8] The information or product is provided by a 'professional' source, the content industry, that possesses an authority on that particular product/information. There is a one-way flow only of creative content and ideas due to a clear role separation between content producer and content consumer. The emerge of Analog mass production and duplication technologies (pre-Digital revolution and internet like radio broad-casting) inherently enabled the RO culture's business model of production and distribution and limited the role of the consumer to consumption of media.

Digital technology does not have the 'natural' constraints of the analog that preceded it. RO culture had to be recoded in order to compete with the "free" distribution made possible by the Internet. This is primarily done in the form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which imposes largely arbitrary restrictions on usage. Regardless, DRM has proven largely ineffective in enforcing the constraints of analog media.[9]

As opposed to RO culture, Read/Write culture has a reciprocal relationship between the producer and the consumer. Taking works, such as songs, and appropriating them in private circles is exemplary of RW culture, which was considered to be the 'popular' culture before the advent of reproduction technologies.[8] The technologies and copyright laws that soon followed, however, changed the dynamics of popular culture. As it became professionalized, people were taught to defer production to the professionals.

Digital technologies provide the tools for reviving RW culture and democratizing production, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0. Blogs explain the three layers of this democratization. Blogs have redefined our relationship to the content industry as they allowed access to non-professional, user-generated content. The 'comments' feature that soon followed provided a space for readers to have a dialogue with the amateur contributors. 'Tagging' of the blogs by users based on the content provided the necessary layer for users to filter the sea of content according to their interest. The third layer added bots that analyzed the relationship between various websites by counting the clicks between them and, thus, organizing a database of preferences. The three layers working together established an ecosystem of reputation that served to guide users through the blogosphere. While there is no doubt many amateur online publications cannot compete with the validity of professional sources, the democratization of digital RW culture and the ecosystem of reputation provides a space for many talented voices to be heard that was not available in the pre-digital RO model.

Domains of remixing

Folklore

An illustration from a 1354 Syrian edition of the Panchatantra, an ancient Indian collection of animal fables. The original work is believe to be composed around the 3rd century BCE,[10] based on older oral traditions, including "animal fables that are as old as we are able to imagine".[11]
Various "remixed" Free Beer variants in recipe and label artwork, created since the first release in 2005 under a Creative Commons license.

Graffiti

  • Graffiti is an example of read/write culture where the participants interact with their surroundings and environment. In much the same way that advertisements decorate walls, graffiti allows the public to choose the images to have displayed on their buildings. By using spray paint, or other mediums, the artists essentially remix and change the wall or other surface to display their twist or critique. As example, Banksy is a notable contemporary English graffiti artist.

Books and other information

File:WikimediaMosaicCapture.png
Wikimedia logo mosaic to commemorate the one millionth file at Wikimedia Commons. Remixed from the contributed images on the Wikimedia commons.

Software and other digital goods

Software as digital good is well suited for adaption and remixing.

Music

  • DJing the act of live rearranging and remixing pre-recorded music material to new compositions. From this music "remix" the term remix spread to other domains.
  • Sampling in music making is an example of reuse and remix to produce a new work. Sampling is widely popular within hip-hop culture. Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were some of the earliest hip-hop artists to employ the practice of sampling. This practice can also be traced to artists such as Led Zeppelin, who sampled many acts including Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Jake Holmes, and Spirit [22] By taking a small clip of an existing song, changing different parameters such as pitch, and incorporating it into a new piece, the artist can make it their own.
  • Music mashups are blends of existing music tracks. For instance the mashup album The Beastles received in 2004 acclaim[23][24] and was featured in Newsweek[25] and Rolling Stone.[26] A second album named Let It Beast with cover art by cartoonist Josh Neufeld was produced in 2006.

Movies

In film, remixing is often done and happens in many forms.

  • Most new movies are adaptations of comics, graphic novels, books, or other forms of media. The majority of other Hollywood cinema works are typically genre films that follow strict generic plots.[27] These forms of movies hardly appear original and creative, but rather rely on adapting material from previous works or genre formulas, which is a form of remix. A prime example is the film Kill Bill which takes many techniques and scene templates from other films (predating all this were The Magnificent Seven, an official remake of The Seven Samurai along with Sergio Leone's A Fistful Of Dollars).[28]
  • Video mashups combine multiple pre-existing video sources with no discernible relation with each other into a unified video. Examples of mashup videos include movie trailer remixes, vids, YouTube Poop, and supercuts.[29][30]
  • Vidding is the fan labor practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way. The specialized form for animation shows is called Anime music videos, also made by fans.
  • VJing, similarly as DJing is the realtime manipulation of imagery through technological mediation and for an audience, in synchronization to music.[31]
  • Fandubs and Fansubs are reworks of fans on released film material.
  • Walt Disney works are important company remixing examples, for instance Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Frozen. These remixes are based on earlier public domain works (although Disney films altered from their original sources).[32][33] Lawrence Lessig called therefore Walt Disney a "remixer extraordinaire" and praised him as ideal of the remix culture in 2010.[34] Some journalist report that Disney tolerates remixes of fans (Fan art) easier than in former times.[35]

History

Remixing was always a part of the human culture.[36] For instance US media scholar Professor Henry Jenkins argued that “the story of American arts in the 19th century might be told in terms of the mixing, matching and merging of folk traditions taken from various indigenous and immigrant populations.” Another historical example of remixing is Cento, a literary genre popular in Medieval Europe consisting mainly of verses or extracts directly borrowed from the works of other authors and arranged in a new form or order.[36]

The balance between creation and consumption shifted with the technological progress on media recording and reproduction. Notable events are the invention of book printing press and the analog Sound recording and reproduction leading to severe cultural and legal changes.

Analog era

In the begin of the 20th century on the dawn of the analog Sound recording and reproduction revolution John Philip Sousa, an American composer and conductor of the late Romantic era, warned in 1906 in a congressional hearing on a negative change of the musical culture by the now available "canned music".[37][38] <templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />

"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."

Specialized, expensive creation devices ("read-write") and specialized cheap consumption ("read-only") devices allowed a centralized production by few and decentralized consumption by many. Analog devices for consumers for low prices, lacking the capability of writing and creating, spread out fast: Newspapers, Jukebox, radio, television. This new business model, an Industrial information economy, demanded and resulted in the strengthening of the exclusive copyright and a weakening of the remix culture and the Public domain in throughout the 19th and 20th century.

Analog creation devices were expensive and also limited in their editing and rearranging capability. An analog copy of an work (e.g. an audio tape) can't be edited, copied and worked on infinite often as the quality continuously worsens. Despite that, a creative remixing culture survived to some limited degree. For instance composer John Oswald coined in 1985 the Plunderphonics term in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative for sound collages based on existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition.

Remixing as digital age phenomena

IBM Personal Computer XT in 1988, an digital remixing enabling prosumer device, affordable for the masses.

The technological situation changed fundamentally with the digital revolution,[39] digital information could be reproduced and edited infinite often without quality loss. Still, in the 1960s the first digital general computing devices with such capabilities were meant only for specialists and professionals and were extremely expensive; first consumer oriented devices like video game consoles inherently lacked again the RW capability. But the arrival in the 1980s of the home computer and especially the IBM personal computer brought a digital prosumer device, a device usable for production and consumption at the same time, to the masses for an affordable price.[40][41] Similarly for software, in the 1990s the free and open source software movement implemented a software ecosystem based on the idea of edit-ability by anyone.

Internet and web 2.0

The arrival of the Internet on end 1990s/begin 2000s in all domains of art, technology and society created a highly effective way to re-implement a "remix culture" again. Unlike earlier TV and radio, with an unidirectional information transport (producer to consumer), the Internet is inherently bidirectional, enabling a peer-to-peer dynamic. This accelerated with the Web 2.0 and more user-generated content due to Commons-based peer production possibilities. Remixes of songs, videos, and photos are easily distributed and created. There is a constant revision to what is being created, which is done on both a professional and amateur scale. The availability of various end-user oriented software such as GarageBand and Adobe Photoshop make it easy to remix. The Internet allows distribution of remixes to the masses. Internet memes are an Internet-specific creative content which got created, filtered and transformed by the viral spreading process made possible by the web and its users.

Foundation of the Creative Commons

Creative Commons license spectrum between public domain (top) and all rights reserved (bottom). On the left side the permitted use cases, on the right side the license components. Remixing is permitted in the two green license groups.

As response to a more restrictive becoming copyright system (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension, DMCA), which started to limit the blooming sharing and remixing activities of the web, in 2001 Lawrence Lessig founded the Creative Commons. In 2002 the Creative Commons released a set of Licenses as tools to enable remix culture, by allowing a balanced, fair enabling release of creative works, "some rights reserved" instead of the usual "all rights reserved". Several companies and governmental organizations adapted this approach and licenses in the following years, for instance flickr, DeviantART and Europeana using or offering CC license options which allow remixing. There are several webpages addressing this remix culture, for instance ccMixter founded 2004.

The 2008 open-source film by Brett Gaylor RiP!: A Remix Manifesto documents "the changing concept of copyright".[42][43]

In 2012 Canada's Copyright Modernization Act explicitly added a new exemption which allows non-commercial remixing.[44] In 2013 the US court ruling Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. acknowledged that amateur remixing might fall under fair use and copyright holders are requested to check and respect fair use before doing DMCA take down notices.[45]

Copyright

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Under copyright laws of many countries, anyone with the intent to remix an existing work is liable for lawsuit because the laws protect the intellectual property of the work. However, current copyright laws are proving to be ineffective at preventing sampling of content.[46] On the other hand, fair-use does not address a wide enough range of use-cases and its borders are not well established and defined, making usage under "fair use" legally risky. Lessig argues that there needs to be a change in the current state of copyright laws to legalize remix culture, especially for fair-use cases. He states that "outdated copyright laws have turned our children into criminals."[47] One proposition is to adopt the system of citation used with book references. The artist would cite the intellectual property she sampled which would give the original creator the credit, as is common with literature references. As tools for doing so Lawrence Lessig proposed the Creative Commons licenses which demand for instance Attribution without restricting the general use of an creative work. One step further is the Free content movement, which proposes that creative content should be released under free licenses. The Copyright reform movement tries to tackle the problem by cutting for instance the excessive long copyright terms, as it was debated by scholar Rufus Pollock.[48][49]

Other (copyright) scholars, such as Yochai Benkler and Erez Reuveni,[50] promulgate ideas that are closely related to remix culture in 2007. Some scholars argue that the academic and legal institutions must change with the culture towards one that is remix based.[51]

Reception and impact

In his 2006 book Cult of the Amateur.",[52] Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen criticizes Free and Read-Write Culture.

In February 2010 Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez praised the remix activities for its social value, "for performing social realities" and remarked that copyright should be evaluated regarding the "level of control permitted to be exercised over our social realities".[53][54]

According to Kirby Ferguson in 2011 and his popular TED talk series,[55] everything is a remix, and that all original material builds off of and remixes previously existing material.[56] He argues if all intellectual property is influenced by other pieces of work, copyright laws would be unnecessary. Critics like UC Davis professor Thomas W. Joo criticized remix culture for romanticizing free culture.[57][58]

In June 2015 a WIPO article named "Remix Culture and Amateur Creativity: A Copyright Dilemma"[45] acknowledged the "age of remixing" and the need for a copyright reform.

See also

References

  1. downloads on creativecommons.org "The building blocks icon used to represent “to remix” is derived from the FreeCulture.org logo."
  2. Remix on lessig.org
  3. Remix on scribd.com
  4. Remixing Culture And Why The Art Of The Mash-Up Matters on Crunch Network by Ben Murray (Mar 22, 2015)
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  7. Lessig on OSCON 2002
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  9. A New Deal for Copyright on Locus Magazine by Cory Doctorow (2015)
  10. 10.0 10.1 Jacobs 1888, Introduction, page xv; Ryder 1925, Translator's introduction, quoting Hertel: "the original work was composed in Kashmir, about 200 B.C. At this date, however, many of the individual stories were already ancient."
  11. 11.0 11.1 Doris Lessing, Problems, Myths and Stories, London: Institute for Cultural Research Monograph Series No. 36, 1999, p 13
  12. See page 262 of Kalila and Dimna, Selected fables of Bidpai [Vol 1], retold by Ramsay Wood, Knopf, New York, 1980; and the Afterword of Medina's 2011 Fables of Conflict and Intrigue (Vol 2)
  13. Introduction, Olivelle 2006, quoting Edgerton 1924.
  14. Ryder 1925, Translator's introduction: "The Panchatantra contains the most widely known stories in the world. If it were further declared that the Panchatantra is the best collection of stories in the world, the assertion could hardly be disproved, and would probably command the assent of those possessing the knowledge for a judgment."
  15. Edgerton 1924, p. 3. "reacht" and "workt" have been changed to conventional spelling: '"...there are recorded over two hundred different versions known to exist in more than fifty languages, and three-quarters of these languages are extra-Indian. As early as the eleventh century this work reached Europe, and before 1600 it existed in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Old Slavonic, Czech, and perhaps other Slavonic languages. Its range has extended from Java to Iceland... [In India,] it has been worked over and over again, expanded, abstracted, turned into verse, retold in prose, translated into medieval and modern vernaculars, and retranslated into Sanskrit. And most of the stories contained in it have "gone down" into the folklore of the story-loving Hindus, whence they reappear in the collections of oral tales gathered by modern students of folk-stories."
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  19. Puts a Portal Gun in Super Mario Bros on Kotaku (2012)
  20. Computer game mods, modders, modding, and the mod scene by Walt Scacchi on First Monday Volume 15, Number 5 (3 May 2010)
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  30. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/08/04/tech-diary-video-mashups-a-new-kind-of-art/
  31. "VJ: an artist who creates and mixes video live and in synchronization to music". - Eskandar, p.1.
  32. 50 Disney Movies Based On The Public Domain on forbes.com (2014)
  33. How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain on priceonomics.com (Jan 7, 2016)
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  35. How Disney learned to stop worrying and love copyright infringement on salon.com by Andrew Leonard (2014)
  36. 36.0 36.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  37. Bierley, Paul Edmund, "The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa". University of Illinois Press, 2006. Page 82
  38. Lawrence Lessig, 2008, Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Chapter 1. "These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."
  39. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  40. The Coming War on General Computation at 28C3 by Cory Doctorow (2011-12-30)
  41. Prosumption by pineight.com
  42. Kirsner, Scott. "CinemaTech Filmmaker Q&A: Brett Gaylor of Open Source Cinema".
  43. Sinnott, Shane. "The Load-Down", Montreal Mirror, 2007-03-29. Accessed 2008-06-30
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  50. Erez Reuveni, "Authorship in the Age of the Conducer", Social Science Research Network, January 2007
  51. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  52. Keen, Andrew (May 16, 2006). Web 2.0; The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It's worse than you think. The Weekly Standard
  53. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  54. The Evolution of Remix Culture by Julian Sanchez (2010-02-05)
  55. THOUGHTS ON REMIX CULTURE, COPYRIGHT, AND CREATIVITY by Melanie Picard (August 6, 2013)
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  57. Remix Without Romance: What Free Culture Gets Wrong by Terry Hart (April 18, 2012)
  58. Remix Without Romance Connecticut Law Review Vol.44 by THOMAS W. JOO (December 2011)

External links