Why waste your time futilely shaking your fist at the driver who cut you off on the country road when you can take him to task on the information superhighway?
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Originality and remix culture in the age of the web
WHAT makes a piece of art an “original work”?
It’s one of the biggest questions when it comes to copyright in the age of the web — and if the music industry had its way there would be far less original music art available.
Albums blurring the line of “originality” range from DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing... (made entirely of samples and commercially released to great acclaim) to Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (a mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ The White Album which EMI stopped distributing, but is still available illegally online).
Now an Israeli artist called Kutiman is dazzling the online world with a mashup lovingly created over three months from a collection of hundreds of YouTube clips, creating a seven track compilation called ThruYOU.
All the basic details are in our story on Kutiman today. You can watch one of his videos below:
Isn’t this sort of thing what the internet is all about? Not the legal minefield Kutiman’s standing in the middle of â€" which sadly seems to have grabbed most of the attention â€" but the skills involved in building new things upon old, sharing ideas and watching others enhance them and taking inspiration from the firehose of content that is the real heartbeat of the web.
Online content isn’t about mainstream celebrities dominating the small guys, no matter what the million-follower counts on Twitter may say. Even the interest Susan Boyle has generated is an example of an unknown voice shining above celebrity (no matter how manufactured the moment may have been).
Kutiman’s ThruYOU highlights the shared creativity of everyday netizens, basing his remixes on unknown bedroom artists and otherwise anonymous YouTube users. In the site’s disclaimer, Kutiman claims the project is shared out of “love and respect” for the featured artists and asks anyone who has a problem or wishes for their clip to be removed to get in touch with him.
In fact, when you watch ThruYOU closely, you can see he is obsessive in his edits and in no small way acts as a true editor. He gets more out of his subjects than they did on their own. Detailed cuts and adjustments to how they perform their music improves their musicality. Don’t people often pay for the privilege of having somebody help them be better than they were before?
Maybe the biggest copyright question here is not whether Kutiman should be allowed to do what he has done. He did and it’s there for all to enjoy. But in essence, copyright is meant to protect the rights of an author to encourage innovation and creative endeavour.
In the age of the mashup, some of the most innovative and creative work is coming from artists like Kutiman. Where is their encouragement? Where is their incentive to innovate? If copyright made it easier for artists like this to profit from their efforts, more artists would test new creative ideas built upon old ones.
A few people might make a few dollars less for their efforts (if it was good enough in the first place it would still have made a few), but culture in general would be the winner if more artists like Kutiman came along.
Seamus Byrne is the host of the video podcast Midnight Update.
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