(more) lessig
My claim is that the Internet should at least force us to rethink the conditions under which the law of copyright automatically applies, because it is clear that the current reach of copyright was never contemplated, much less chosen, by the legislators who enacted copyright law.
-Lawrence Lessig, Open Culture p17-18
In our discussion of worlding and music, and in trying to change the way you think about sound, we have offered numerous examples of chains of agents, both in the print-based essay and this new, other, expanded online essay. Key to all these examples and explorations, in our attempts to articulate the musical world and soundscape creation, is the possibility of participation. It is in access to the building blocks of texts, be they musical, textual, or multimodal.
The movie 24 Hour Party People chronicles Manchester, England's transformation into Madchester in the 1980s and early 1990s as one site of the post-punk music scene, and many of the bands credit seeing The Sex Pistols play live as the reason they got together to form a band, to make music. Our interpretation is that the Pistols made the processes of music-making visible and accessible to others – as many of the bands we describe in these texts do, from the angular noise of the Residents to the mysterious sweeping hopelandic rebus of Sigur Ros to the glorious accidents that Brian Eno pursues, to the Gesamptkunstwerk of The Flaming Lips – opening up and demystifying the processes of turning noise into sound, arranging and composing those sounds in time, in order to make music that people want to listen to. And those beats, rhythms, melodies and lyrics become part of our lives, part of our consciousness, and not just incorporated into our world, but somehow come to constitute our world—not just a soundtrack for our lives but an element of our lifeworld that impacts action and inspires further creation.
In prodigiously linking online, and in insisting on making this text and is attendant sound and image files creative commons licensed, we have attempted to build a visible (or at least a discernable) network of references, derivative works, technological and artistic artifacts available to readers that at least begin to hint at the inter-related, intersubjective and inter-textual connections and bridges that we have described as worlding. In building this specific sonic landscape, by using elements of text, image, and sound, we refer to and link with existing created worlds as well as make reference to the world and elements within it. The impulse on the part of of some stakeholders, usually the institutional holders of copyright, is to reserve and expand as many rights as possible for as long as possible, no matter how it distorts the spirit of original copyright laws. Consider how problematic this creative mash-up example of old music, re-interpreted images, and new media editing tools becomes for the law to sort out. The most important consideration that seems lost on the prodigous expansion of copyright law is that the author is not making any money from the production, dissemination, and reproduction of these images. And indeed, this work acts as an advertisement for the very ingredients copy right law seeks to protect. The law may very well protect the ecnomic and intellectual life right out of the texts it seeks to protect.
At the heart of Lessig's argument, and of ours, is that we cannot watch monied interests protect their cash cows while making fairly natural (and if not natural, then widespread, accepted and naturalized) new media processes illegal. See, for instance, what Daniel Anderson is discovering about his students' appropriation of new media literacy practices. Remix and mash-up has become as routine as cut and paste for these students, these children of the digital age, who have naturalized the processes of hip-hop culture. It is how we communicate, participate, and articulate our media situation. And no activist corporate effort to outlaw these activities can stand for long. This is what we take Lessig to mean by not making an ass of the law. First, and obviously, the law should be no fool. But also, the law should not be the beast of burden for monied interests who wish to curtail activities they interpret as infringing on their intellectal property rights.
