Will mashups force changes in copyright laws?
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Artist:
Mashups changing the face of copyright laws
By Victoria Ho, ZDNet Asia
User-generated mashups are changing the face of copyright laws, which have to evolve to catch up with the Internet generation, said Mary Wong, an expert on intellectual property (IP).
The professor of law at the U.S.-based Franklin Pierce Law Center, said, in an interview with ZDNet Asia, copyright laws are clear on protecting stolen IP such as videos and music, but enforcement reaches a murkier area when it comes to user-generated content such as mashups, which are not a direct copy of original material.
"The new generation of digital natives are manipulating content online as a form of expression...The democratization of the Internet has facilitated a remix culture, where people are not passive recipients but active creators," said Wong.
And the openness of the Internet has further facilitated a culture of "taking", she said. "Everyone has access [to content]. Enforcement is a global problem. It is a practical problem, because of the reach of where the content might appear. Finding [infringed copyrighted content] is harder."
The gray area is created between the original material--that is someone else's IP--and the "new", composite product that comes from the mashup. "One issue the law has to deal with is this new sense of a user 'right'," she said, referring to that of mashup creators.
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Comments (5)
Short answer: Probably. But mash-up producers have always been bootleggers - and this won't stop the cleverest among them.
A remix culture presaged by Reggae ,Hip Hop, and Disco..
After all the furor about sampling it is interesting to see how little is done with this. I guess when somebody makes a ton of dough off a mash up the lawyers will come knockin' lookin for a piece.
Interesting how Jamaica doesn't seem to give a lick about copyright and they have a vibrant music biz.
I dunno, this is a difficult area. A sample may not be identifiable by the listener. A remix may be readily identifiable as to the original artist and yet represent a new and novel work using the original artist. A mashup is identifiable but incongrous--think of Jim Morrison singing Riders on the Storm, mashed up with Blondie. I am not grieving for the record company, but do the original artists have any right to payment? It's hard to keep track of snippets of sound...
"Snippets of sound" - i.e., samples, yes.
Your own example - Doors and Blondie, both really identifiable - not hard to keep track of.
This all puts me in mind of the Tom's Diner remix thing from right at twenty years ago, and of a remark a friend made about sampling before that:
There's also the lawsuit (which the drummer ultimately lost) by David Earle Johnson, whose old buddy Jan Hammer sampled his Nigerian log drum for the Miami Vice theme; a sound so distinctive that Johnson was getting calls from friends congratulating him on playing on the theme for a network TV show.
i'm surprised jay'z isnt the head of the ant-mash-up committee. i feel like his music is perhaps the most mashed stuff eva. but then again he was all for the linkin park thing, which was pretty good in my opinion. i enjoy mash-ups and feel only if they suck should they be penalized.