By Marc Geelhoed
I want to get behind Lessig’s credo, and make it easier and legal for everyone everywhere to have access to all cultural artifacts and use them as they see fit, for free. If for no other reason than not everyone can afford to buy every song they want, or every book, they ought to be able to get them and digest them and be fulfilled by everything they want. I get that. But I’ve got a couple problems with Lessig’s thesis, mainly stemming from how he frames the past and present, but then getting into how to make it work in the present (that we’ll save for later).
The way I read it, Lessig’s point in Remix is that there existed in the past a “Read-Write” culture, which was followed and supplanted in the 20th century by a “Read-Only” culture. For musicians, this means that sheet music was purchased with the intention of playing and singing it in the future. (Lessig doesn’t go in to this–and footnote number 1, there are oceans of history that Lessig doesn’t go into–but there was a thriving music-publishing industry that was pretty dogged when it came to control over sheet music.) The advent of recording changed this, with the result that fewer people became proficient in playing instruments and singing such that families and friends didn’t gather round to make music, and amateur music-making died out. Or at least, it diminished greatly in importance from the time when the only way to hear music was to hear it performed live.
Today, Lessig argues, “Read-Write” is returning in the form of remixing in video and audio, and that peer-to-peer file-sharing facilitates this. Remixing is today’s version of communication, according to Lessig. In fact, we’ve been remixing all this time and we didn’t know it whenever we quote someone else’s writing. Just as we don’t need an author’s permission to make a point in our own essay (be it in high school, college, or The Atlantic), so we shouldn’t expect amateur musicians to get permission to remix existing music.
(I have to call a Time Out at this point. The point of the hypothetical original essay Lessig refers to was likely that it would serve as a springboard to further ideas and discussion. That was emphatically not the purpose of the song or sonata, or even photograph taken for a newspaper. The intended usage has to have some bearing on how the copyright law views it, right?
Time Out 2 is that the second essayist could presumably make their argument without quoting the original essayist. While the quotation undoubtedly strengthens the argument, the point could still be made. That is not the case with the remix, which by definition can’t exist without something to add to something else.)
Yet it’s this notion of “writing” that Lessig views as the paradigm for all that follows. “It is through text that we elites communicate (look at you, reading this book). For the masses, however, most information is gathered through other forms of media: TV, film, music and music video. These forms of ‘writing’ are the vernacular of today…It is no surprise, then, that these other forms of ‘creating’ are becoming an increasingly dominant form of ‘writing.’ The internet didn’t make these other forms of ‘writing’ (what I will call simply ‘media’) significant…Using the tools of digital technology…anyone can being to ‘write’ using images, or music, or video.”
Like I said, I want to be forward-thinking and get behind this. I don’t want to be the corporate suit saying this is all wrong. But I do think he’s misinterpreted cultural history and intellectual history here. Anyone agree? Before I get shouted down for my admittedly retrograde ideas, I’d just like to say that I do think there’s legitimate criticism to be made using the media in its original form. A perfect example is Thom Andersen’s 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, in which Andersen spliced clips from roughly 150 movies together under his own narration to portray how the city has been portrayed by the film industry. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said in an introduction to a recent screening that “Its importance comes from Andersen’s use of the medium to criticize the medium.” The documentary has never been released on DVD because of the likely headaches in acquiring approval, although it would make a great test-case of the fair-use doctrine.
Do you really think he’s “misinterpreting” history? Or is he just not going very deeply into it, trying to craft as clear and simple an argument as possible in order to avoid the common liberal political trap of nuance and exception?
Good question, Corey. I think it’s both, though: By not digging deeply enough, he ends up drawing fallacious conclusions. While it’s laudable to streamline your argument for the sake of a general audience, it’s problematic to give a tidy picture of the past in order to show a clear path to the future.
Just one thing to clarify, and I’m clarifying by way of agreement, which is to say that the ‘not digging deeply enough’ goes deeper still.
This isn’t just about sheet music. There’s the aural tradition that flourished long before recorded music, what is broadly called folk (blues, etc.), and that is a tradition founded on a remix-like precursor, in which themes, lyric and melodic strands, and other musical materials were reworked by successive creators, each with his or her own claim to an authentic authorship along the timeline.