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Monday, June 22, 2009
Filching and Owning Culture
David Shields and Siva Vaidhyanathan discuss these matters on bloggingheads.tv. Artists have always built on materials created by their predecessors but current copyright laws put that practice under pressure. Shields and Vaidhyanathan make extensive reference to an article Jonathan Lethem published two years ago in Harpers Magazine, The ecstasy of influence:
The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.
This whole business is put in an interesting light by the case of animator Nina Paley and the brilliant film she created over the course of five years mostly by herself: Sita Sings the Blues. Sita’s soundtrack is built around jazz recordings made by Annette Hanshaw in the 1920s. While the recordings themselves are in the public domain, the underlying songs are not. Rather than incur heroically burdensome licensing fees, Paley has made the film available free over the internet. The New York Times ran a feature on Paley and Sita back in February.
Comments
Thank you!
One correction: I did incur heroically burdensome licensing fees. Free circulation wouldn’t absolve me of that; in fact I could have gone to jail for 5 years for non-commercially releasing the film, had I not paid the $50,000 + “step deal” (= extra fees forever) the licensors eventually agreed to (before that it was $220,000). I borrowed the money to decriminalize the film and indemnify the audience who are distributing it. Having paid the fees, I could have legally accepted one of the many (crappy) deals commercial distributors were offering me at the time, but I chose the CC Share Alike license because I could see it would take the film a lot further. More information at this Creative Commons interview.
What impact is the media having on your own culture? Is this a good thing? Is the media helping other cultures get along better? Why or why not?