Copyright versus Creativity

Greetings!

It has been a busy week for this library student, and so I have not yet completed all of the readings.  As such, I will be making a second blog post once I have finished.  However, I have been thinking a lot about one particular topic that has come up in Litman's book Digital Copyright and also in a video watched in class entitled Rip! , that of copyright versus creativity, and just wanted to take the time to write down my thoughts.

Litman points out in her chapter "Just Say Yes to Licensing" that she believes copyright rules have not taken precedence in people's minds because they do not seem to make sense.  People cannot fit them into their mental and moral framework, and end up ignoring them.  It is not that they set out to be thieves, it is that they feel that they have a right to use other's works in an interesting and different way, to play with things and that the government should not have a right to control this. Rip's director Brett Gaylor shows us the end result of this disconnect: people have taken the material available to them online and have created whole new art forms based on playing and sampling this material.  They are borrowing in a way that they feel is fair.  Hip Hop and rap artists, as well as electronica artists rely heavily on samples of other people's work.  YouTube is filled with videos mixing an image from one source with the audio of another, often to humorous effect.  I listen and view this type of work everyday, not thinking about the fact that it might be breaking copyright.  Even though I am a library student (and so technically should know better), I still suffer from this disconnect. I can't believe what I am watching on YouTube that has been made simply for fun, not profit, could actually be illegal.

Processing this all, I realized that the main reason I find it so difficult to wrap my mind around current copyright rules is, as a lover of literature and music, I understood long ago that there are very few completely original works.  I know that copyright, as both Russell and Litman make clear, does not protect ideas, it protects manifestations, no matter how derivative they are.  But that is the point.  Works have always been based and drawn, either to a great deal or little, on what has gone before.  One of my favorite works, as a true geek, is Star Wars, a work that, while new in its approach, was directly based on the hero myth structure set up by scholar Joseph Campbell.  An even more blatant example of borrowing from Star Wars was the styling of Naboo in the second trilogy.  Compare the picture of Naboo to Waterfall City from the excellent book Dinotopia:

Production Art of Naboo

Waterfall City by James Gurney.

All of these works, Star Wars, Joseph Campbell's A Hero with a Thousand Faces, and James Gurney's Dinotopia are copyrighted works. Yet, they build and borrow from one another, creating new from old.  So far, it has not destroyed the world.

When digital users manipulate copyrighted content and view it, they are simply following in the steps of what humans have done for thousands of years: see a creative work, be inspired, and from this inspiration, build something new. The difference is now that material to manipulate is easier to obtain, and so more people can work with it. Copyright holders can no longer rely on people physically not being able to get their hands on information as a barrier to such creation. As Litman says "The old balance is gone. Whatever approach we choose, we need to find a different balance" (pg. 115)  Litman brings us some hope that in the last copyright negotiation, for the Digital Millenium Act, user groups, like libraries and law professors, actually tried to stand up to restrictions via the medium that these restrictions were trying to control: the Internet. Sadly, many of these public advocacy groups, including the library, were ignored. However, I believe that we can, as librarians and the public, strive to create a new balance, and that balance should be one in which creating new things out of old should be celebrated, not quashed.

To top it off, here is one of my personal favorite remixes. Without this type of play, I would have never known that Crank Dat by Soulja Boy and Carol of the Bells have basically the same beat.