Creative content. The latest list of things capitalism ruins. In this society, the rise of a plethora of creative content has given rise to copyrighting. Copyright is defined as a right provided to an individual or institution, by the owner of intellectual property, through a legal body. In more simpler terms. it means the owner of intellectual property basically says “hey! I give you permission to use my work for whatever reason, under certain conditions.” These certain conditions are usually profit related (*eyeroll; capitalism*).

Now lets talk abut digital content. Things that fall under the category of digital content are music, pictures, blogs, videos or any other type of digital data that can be saved to computer files and/or broadcasted. In most cases, digital content is freely available on the internet. You can save and download digital content, giving you the opportunity to edit original intellectual property. This is usually harmless and includes things such as remixing songs, making song covers, patching and stitching scenes of movie together for content, adding a new spin to videos, etc. The majority of the people online get away with this. Until……..they start making money from it. Once money comes into the equation, things can get complicated pretty fast.

Lets use a classic example. Lets say an artist, like Drake drops new music. You like the song, so you created a remix to it and upload it on Youtube. Turns out your remix sounds very good and its really catching on. Before you know it, millions of people are listening and may even think your version is better than the original. You start gaining publicity and even money from the amount of viewers you’re pulling in. Now Drake is angry, and he wants to come for you.  Things continue to get very complicated and messy form then on, as the copyright “infringement” comes into play. Now all of a sudden you’re facing a very expensive lawsuit, followed by a seize and desist order. Oops.

However if things played out differently and your song didn’t catch significant attention, you wouldn’t be dealing with copyright infringement lawsuits. Now do you see why capitalism ruins everything? Even more importantly, do you see how copyright law can get really complicated especially when a larger audience is involved? To make matters worse, the laws that regulate these kinds of situations are often vague.

This example relates to fair use. lets quickly define such term. Fair use can be defined as access to intellectual property under certain conditions, without explicit consent of copyright owner. These certain conditions are usually non monetary and include research, criticism, teaching and satire purposes. In other words, these fair use conditions are presented to the user, in good faith that they wouldn’t use it for personal gains.

In his TED talk, Larry Lessig states the follow in the context of modern day copyright law. “Common sense here has not revolted yet.” Lessig also says “common sense is rare in the law.” I find these quotes compelling because laws nowadays aren’t really made in common sense. Laws are influenced by bodies for whatever reason, even tough common sense clearly revolts against their reasons. For example, Larry gives an example of the pre-airplane era where land rights for land owners extended indefinitely in the air. Anything flying over this land would be considered trespassing. When airplanes arrived, some congressional bodies as well as land owners wanted to keep this law. Common sense clearly revolts at this because if these laws were kept it would mean airplanes would be violating uncountable trespassing laws. Once a supreme court judge saw a flaw in this law, it was immediately modified, in favor of the technological progress of airplanes.

This can be related to copyright law as well. Digital content is now available online and people are capable of downloading it and modifying it, to create new content. A good majority of people are doing this to explore their creative side of to present a new perspective of original work. This in effect creates more content and creativity to be shared online. Copyright law, however is very restrictive and requires users of intellectual property to obtain explicit content from the owner. It’s clear to see how this sort of thinking is outdated and revolts against common sense.

A fictional example of fair use was presented earlier on. Now lets look at more real life examples. Richard Prince is a artist who was sued by Patrick Cariou for “infringing on his work. The image on the right is the original work and the image on the left is the creatively modified version Prince created.

Andy Baino, another person to get sued for copyright related reasons, is in a similar situation as Prince. Below on the left is the original intellectual property of Miles Davis. On the right is the heavily pixelated created spin Andy Baino created.

Now, in my perfectly honest opinion, there’s not much difference between Baino and Princes’ work from the original. Even though they have some creative additions such as Prince’s photo markups and Baino’s heavy pixelations, the creative works are obviously very similar to the original. In other words, I don’t think they are creative enough.

Both of their creative takes have enough presence of the original work to make it look like a copyright infringement, however good their intentions were.  Does this mean they deserve to get sued? I don’t think so, if their intentions were to purely express themselves. I personally don’t think this wouldn’t have been a problem if both artists weren’t relatively well known. If they were some underground artists that were barely known, I doubt they would be in this predicament. Since they’re well known and have potential to mobilize an entire audience, that’s where fair use really becomes challenging. Its no surprise that intellectual owners become jealous or feel violated when someone else uses their works and it garners a lot of attention, as they should. Even though the modifiers of this intellectual property mean no harm, they easily fall victim to fair use infringement lawsuits. These lawsuits are usually in favor of the intellectual owner and ends up in a settlement.

Fair use laws remain vague and vary from situation to situation. It is about time for a serious change to the laws. I don’t think it’s that hard to distinguish between someone whos using original works for monetary gains vs someone using it for creative expression. This is where the common sense comes into play. Its tie for common sense to revolt on these laws, so a balance can exist between original intellectual owner and creative artists. There is a compromise that exists between the two. Maybe a little pinch of common sense is all it takes to realize it.

I just gave you food for thought, now you do the dishes!