More silliness from Warners, who after nixing my video and many other peoples seem to be taking over EMI’s previous Public Enemy #1 Evil spot really quickly.

So you have a talk about copyright by Lawrence Lessig, a leading expert and thinker in the field, founder of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford Law School. So you’re Warners what do you do – do you allow the fair use in a presentation of short clips talking about remix culture, mashups and video remixes, or do you DMCA the leading Creative Commons and copyright expert in the field? Guess what they did. Dumb.

And unwise, because unlike the many people who get their mashup videos or their baby videos silenced on YouTube, Larry has the means, the law and the public platform to make this very messy.

Go Larry, go!

Someone reposted this video to blip so you can see what the fuss is about. I haven’t worked out the bit that enraged Warners – all the bits I’ve seen so far are either Universal, Disney or EMI.

Interesting talk about Philip De Souza vs record players, it reminds me of the same ‘anti-creative’ ‘anti-social’ argument I’ve had with many people over Twitter, and have expressed here in the past. The effect of technology on creativity, and restrictions and law that come with them are very interesting to me, and politically volatile. And interesting that news of this came out via Twitter…

But having now watched the whole video I have to say I agree with Lessig’s call for change, and for stopping the Copyright Wars, and allowing remixing and extending fair use for amateur works – but I don’t agree that the laws should be adapted, and the status quo of copyright extended into a new age. The laws don’t work, the ship is far too creaky – let it sink and create new laws. Also as he partly points out, the hybrid of Web 2.0 poses very big problems – the ‘free’ content of reviews, remixes, comments, posts, votes is increasingly owned by the corporations even if like with Amazon it increases their value. The ‘just’ hybrid of sharing these gains under the capitalist system will NEVER happen.

The concept of copyright has been abused from the original idea during the time of printing – a right to copy after a certain time, to allow creative re-use, but also give the original artists a breathing space for copying – to one that is presented as some retirement plan for artists, and something that is notenabling a right to copy but a preventation of copying. And original was apparently a law to protect the owners NOT the authors; this kind of enclosure act is evil, and doesn’t seem to be supporting the majority of artists anyway, but their overlords. A fairer system is not the existing copyright laws of now 70+ years, obviously yes artists need protection of some sort; I’d not be happy if people take my pictures and call them their own and exploit them for commercial gain – but if them adapting my pictures causes me to get more exposure and I get a cut of it, fine. But the law as it stands is binary, I either say ‘yes screw me’ or ‘no not at all’ – no grey area, apart from CC which I use for some of my photos. I shouldn’t need to give permission unless it’s a commercial use, and in fact that is actually what is happening, but it’s illegal.

So these tangled wire of laws does not seem to me as being fair, nor consistently applied, nor consistently created in uniform fashion – the piecemeal approach has very large holes in it – so why continue to patch the leaky ship?

I mean I can’t see a company realising the people interacting with it are increasing it’s value so offering them shares or money for example? The best that will happen is for people to own their own content, but then back we go into nightmares of usage and permission, and these people won’t have the stake in the company that in fact will increase the interaction and give them a warm fuzzy feeling.

Also I disagree that P2P, torrenting and file sharing of complete unaltered works is in any way harmful to ‘the industry’ or artists. In fact, as he showed in the video an example of Kodak and deregulation of images of people and lack of control in the photographic market – same applies to music and videos on P2P. The explosion of blogs, Myspace, interest in a wide varieties of music and partial breakdown of genre ‘walls’ is in part due to this, people getting exposed to far more music is NOT a bad thing.

Getting it for free does not mean they will never buy anything; in fact the opposite seems to be the case with people who share buying either more music they’d not buy, or downloading the stuff they weren’t going to buy anyway, or paying for ancillary/related industries such as seeing bands live, tshirts, stickers, posters, related projects etc. Like with free books, this is not a clear cut case of free=insane or free=shit. That is also developing a relationship of interaction, which the industry should embrace, and do on the sly giving blogs and DJs free promos and ‘leaked’ tracks. It is literally one rule for a small accepted ‘in’ crowd and another for the larger ‘out’ crowd of ‘punters’ (how I hate that term, and I use it with all the negative connoitations intact).

And don’t forget, if you select Quicktime and have QT Pro (or hack around the code) you can download it. Just sayin’ like

Readers of Radio Clash will know what Warner Media Group did to my Neon Sex People video mashup on YouTube (NSFW – audio and text contains a ‘message’ for WMG and uses music from a great unsigned artist Playgyrl Slim). Annoying, especially as Depeche Mode USED to be on EMI and somehow have transmogrified over to the dark side of WMG – and it’s definitely a transformative and non-commercial use but mashups are still in a grey area.

You might have wondered why all the silent videos on YouTube – they are the victims of this ‘fair use massacre’.

The staple of YouTube amateur musical media, covers – they should be alright, right?

Wrong:

Warners as well as other ‘content owners’ have been using the ContentID system to identify tracks that use their content – fingerprinting technology – but it doesn’t count for fair-use, remixed usage, comment or background use – other owners just share the ad revenue and leave the content in place – but not Warners – but it seems not even covers or remixes or mashups avoid the chop.

As it says in this EFF article:

And while today it’s Warner Music, as more copyright owners start using the Content ID tool, it’ll only get worse. Soon it may be off limits to remix anything with snippets of our shared mass media culture — music, TV, movies, jingles, commercials. That would be a sad irony — copyright being used to stifle an exciting new wellspring of creativity, rather than encourage it.

It’s clear from the Warner Music experience that YouTube’s Content ID tool fails to separate the infringements from the arguable fair uses.

This lack of separation is worrying; various IP and video bodies have said how derivative amateur works, covers etc. are not the problem and for such use as background music should be allowed as otherwise it has a freezing effect on culture, with landgrabs and fences put up everywhere around even the simplest folk song or melody (see the infamous Happy Birthday case which is…you guessed it, Warners! Interestingly this might actually be also public domain as it was published before 1935 by others without copyright notice).

So EFF are asking for examples of your Warners-pulled videos on YouTube – not full music video rips but works that have original content in them (whether that applies to mashups I don’t know – remixes maybe).

In other news, in a case of Pop (Industry) Will Eat Itself, even if you’re signed to Warners you are not safe – Warners is also taking down videos posted by their own artists – such as Moby (who was quoted as saying ‘If it was up to me they’d all be up there and they’d all be free. But, at present, it’s not up to me, it’s up to THE MAN. In the future that will hopefully be different.’) Freezepop, Death Cab for Cutie. Amanda Palmer, Dresden Dolls, and Emiliana Torrini. Nice.

Following on from a Boing Boing post – and this great article by Mark Dery and have been researching this new Orphan Works Act and have been rather disturbed and worried. It reads like a land-grab on Intellectual Property rights that only the rich stock libraries or famous artists could afford to register or submit their works to the online registries. I think the worry is justified given that so much is available online and copyright owners have little control over what gets pirated or published without their consent, and without credit. Just saying ‘I couldn’t find it’ is not enough of a defence IMO, if acceptible for damage mitigation – especially or commercial use of images or music.

People might think this stance is paradoxical given my background and past on these issues – well I am a photographer and designer by trade too – and although this law might be great for mashups (doubtful, since the record companies already register via publishing, and most have the funds to do so) I also do believe in compensation for artists and photographers for the work they do if commercially used – by and large people who remix culture don’t charge because of the legal issues; OWA might change that (for good or bad) but I personally feel a little sick that my photos, designer work or music could be used without permission because I don’t have the $$$s or time to register them with these fictional online registries – it will bias against people who are semi-pro or amateur, or small businesses.

I think a better model might be one that defaults to Creative Commons Non Commercial – kind of like a proper public domain law for orphans, that where there is a question mark non-commercial uses are OK. I think most of the objections to this law are around monetary issues – I think most people already are not bothered by non commercial uses of their works, as it’s fairly unpoliceable on the Net anyway, but usually small scale and doesn’t do any damage – but I can see a lot of objections to commercial uses of ‘orphan’ works, ethically, monetarily or artistically.

And tbh this seems a total corruption of what Orphan works were supposed to cover – it was supposed to be older but uncredited works that have fallen out and now into copyright law and had a grey status, like the musical works that weren’t extended pre 1976, or privately published works by companies long gone.

Not some kids photographs from 2008 that he or she couldn’t afford to register….

Sadly this silly piece of legislation is more likely to put back the whole orphan/fair use debate back many years, since creators are going to take one look at the lack of commercial control and unworkable time and expense registering their portolio of work here and go ‘I don’t like this’ whereas the whole issues of orphans, public domain, fair use and such like are really important and need better laws that allow people to create remixed works but allow some semblance of control for all artists and creators over how their work is used, especially commercially since companies tend to have the better lawyers…and that’s where most of the disparity lies.

Negativland press short – early 80’s? I mean WTF David doesn’t have a beard so it’s early – culturejammed a little by me

In a conversation recently I found several people who had no idea who Negativland are – being the sort to want to show people new music and bring it to them, here are two shows about the Bay Area merry band of pranksters, culturejammers, CB radio and cutup freaks that not only pissed off U2 (bonus!) fell out with SST (seems like everyone has since) they also pioneered using the media to subvert it’s own message with Helter Stupid and the murders by David Brom, inspiring mashups and cutup culture in the process.

They ARE the grandaddies of mashup. So pay attention children!

This episode, inspired by the dense collage of Over The Edge shows that the band have been doing since the early 80’s on KPFA in Berkeley, takes us from the start of Negativland shrouded in the fog and sex chemicals of Concord in 1980, to being sued bea sate by Bono and co. in 1991 even ironically as U2 embark on the culturejamming inspired tour that was ZooTV…

Sea Bea Sate! Play Black Sabbath at 78 (56Mb, 73 mins)

• Negativland – Track01 (from Negativland, 1980)
• Negativland – Track06 (from Negativland, 1980)
• Negativland – Track09 (from Negativland, 1980)
• Negativland – The Answer is…(from Points, 1981)
• Negativland – Theme From A Big 10-8 Place (from A Big 10-8 Place, 1983)
• Negativland – Four Fingers (from A Big 10-8 Place, 1983)
• Negativland – The Way of It (from Escape from Noise, 1987)
• Negativland – Michael Jackson (from Escape from Noise, 1987)
• Negativland – Play It Again (from Unsound cassette, 1987)
• Negativland – Methods of Torture (from Escape from Noise, 1987)
• Negativland – A Big 10-8 Place Part One (from A Big 10-8 Place, 1983)
• 180 Gs – Car Bomb (from 180 D’Gs To The Future, 2007)
• Negativland – Christianity Is Stupid (from Escape from Noise, 1987)
• Negativland – Helter Stupid (newscast, from Helter Stupid 1989)
• 180 Gs – Helter Stupid (from 180 D’Gs To The Future, 2007)
• Negativland – The Perfect Cut (Rooty Poops from Helter Stupid 1989)
• Negativland – Perfect Scrambled Eggs (from Potatoes)
• Negativland – Long Distance Dedication #2 (live) (from These Guys Are from England…2001)
• Negativland – I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For [1991 A Capella Mix]
• Instamatic – Still Haven’t Found It
• Negativland – U2: Special Edit Radio Mix (U2 single, 1991)
• Negativland – Wake Up America (live – from These Guys Are from England…2001)
• Negativland – Long Distance Dedication #1 (live – from These Guys Are from England…2001)
• Negativland – A Big 10-8 Place Part One (from A Big 10-8 Place, 1983)
• Negativland – 07-The Perfect Cut (White Rabbit and a Dog Named Gidget – from Helter Stupid 1989)
• Negativland – 03-The Perfect Cut (Canned Music – from Helter Stupid 1989)
• Negativland – 06-The Perfect Cut (Piece of Meat – from Helter Stupid 1989)
• Negativland – Please Don’t Sue Us (from Fair Use, 1995)
• Negativland – Harry to the Ferry (from Points, 1981)

Also sneakily mixed in and appropriated are clips from the excellent 1995 Sonic Outlaws documentary – go find a copy! Or you can see a low-res online Flash version here from Denver OpenMedia.

There’s also a great history of the group here

Some of you will know about the Gowers report on Copyright which recommended the loosening on rules around ‘fair use’ in the UK similarly to US rap groups and parodies in the US. Now according to the wonderful Open Rights group they are looking for examples from artists to give Patent Office where more relaxed copyright would have made things easier.

They are looking for concrete examples of creative practices inhibited by the law, to back up proposed exceptions for the purposes of “creative, transformative or derivative works” and “caricature, parody or pastiche”. Would you, your colleagues, students or collaborators benefit from these exceptions? Are you working or have you worked on a project outlawed by the overly-protectionst copyright regime, which would have benefited from these kinds of exceptions? If so, please get in touch – info[at]openrightsgroup.org – and share your experience.

Obviously the introduction of similar ‘fair use’ laws as in the US would transform mashups and sample-culture, podcasting, remixing, music performance, recording and such like, so please give examples to Open Rights Group, they seem to be good people on the side of angels (and not Record Industry shills afaik).

Please do this – or at least if you don’t, don’t moan to me about the arcane UK copyright laws in future – we have out chance and it’s now.