The film can be seen here for free.
Chronicling a wide range of perspectives on copyright, the film includes the viewpoints of a DJ in Pittsburgh, various academic intellectual property experts and copyright lawyers in the United States, music producer Danger Mouse, the head of the MPAA Dan Glickman, pirated DVD sellers in Russia, the creators of the world's largest p2p tracker site The Pirate Bay, members of the "Pirate Party" political movement in Sweden, the founder of Creative Commons Larry Lessig, producers from the Nigerian film industry, and members of the tecno brega movement of Brazil.
The main message of Good Copy, Bad Copy is that there needs to be a careful re-examination of copyright law in order to establish a balance between what is beneficial to artists and what should be available for public access and to help future artists create. The film does not advocate piracy, but at the same time it attacks corporations that hinder creativity by placing too many controls on media.
Opening Remarks - Rep. Doyle
The film opens with footage from the 2007 House of Representatives hearing on the future of digital media. Representative Mike Doyle (D - Pennsylvania 14th District) tells the story of one of his constituents, in Rep. Doyle's words, "A local guy done good."
"By day, he's a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh. At night, he DJs under the name 'Girl Talk.' His shtick as the Chicago Tribune wrote about him is 'based on the notion that some sampling of copyrighted material, especially when manipulated and re-contextualized into a new art-form, is legit and deserves to be heard.' In one example, Mr. Chairman, he blended Elton John, Notorious BIG, and Destiny's Child, all in the span of 30 seconds."
Girl Talk
Enter a young, nerdy fella who immediately makes a joke about how ragged his car is. This young man is Pittsburgh DJ Girl Talk, a music producer who heavily samples other songs in order to create new musical works. Taking the film crew back to his modest apartment, Girl Talk demonstrates how he takes various clips of copyrighted music and layers them to create a new song. He talks about his new album, Night Ripper, and notes that on the inside sleeve of the CD he gives thanks to every artist he sampled to make this album. Girl Talk comes back regularly in the film, serving as a sort of anchor, giving insights to the culture of music creation and the purpose of copyright.
To help clarify his stance on the ethics of sampling and remixing, Girl Talk explains,
"Everyone is bombarded with media enough that, I think, we've almost been forced to kind of take it upon ourselves to use it as an art-form. If people were passing out paints on the street for free everyday, I'm sure there would be a lot more painters out there. That's exactly what's happening right now with remix culture on the Internet. I hate that current laws are, in a lot of ways, inhibiting the flow of culture and music."Girl Talk demonstrates how he uses two drum beats, the guitar riff from AC/DC's "Money Talks," and a vocal track from hip-hop artist T.I. to create a new track. He then talks about the trouble with legal forms of sampling,
"I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be happy paying royalties for every sample I put on a record. But that's not what it would be. To actually license a sample would cost millions of dollars, which I can't afford. If sampling could be this form of music that you couldn't make music [sic] off of because you'd have to give all your money away, that would still be cool because it would still be this new way to make music. In a theoretical world, if I could clear every sample and I had a million dollars or a billion dollars to do it, it would still take me 50 years to go through the legal hassle of figuring all that out. And that's just absurd."Girl Talk admits that he does illegally download music sometimes, but he tries to pay for music whenever he can. He romanticizes about being a kid and going to record stores, hunting down the album he wanted, and listening to the album while reading the liner notes from inside the CD sleeve. He voices his concern that the newest generation of music consumers might not appreciate music in the same way that he does because these days people are less likely to be collectors of music and more likely to be casual observers, grabbing music passively through downloading, or from a stream or cloud.
P-Funk and NWA - an Academic and Legal Investigation
The film next looks into the case of Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, in which the hip-hop group NWA was sued by Bridgeport Music for sampling 2 seconds of the Funkadelic song "Get Off your Ass and Jam" for their song, "100 Miles and Runnin." In the original case, a federal judge ruled that NWA did not commit copyright infringement. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit reversed the decision and found NWA to be in violation of copyright law. The court wrote:
"Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."Paul V. Licalsi, the lawyer for NWA, argues that sampling is a key aspect of hip-hop music. He states,
"So many people have said that [the court's ruling] is the death nail for hip-hop music."Jane Peterer, from Bridgeport Music, shows the film crew around her office, points out the library of music that Bridgeport owns the copyright on, and has her assistant demonstrate how NWA took and manipulated three notes of a guitar riff off the intro to "Get Off your Ass and Jam," even though played back-to-back, these two pieces of music are barely recognizable.
Paul V. Licalsi explains the legal construct of de minimis (Latin - not concerned with minimal things) and how he felt that the NWA case was a perfect chance to file for de minimis use. Jane Peterer argues that NWA did not have a case for de minimis use, but she doesn't really explain why. She merely goes on to describe the court's ruling in Bridgeport Music's favor (not mentioning that this decision was made in the Court of Appeals). She reiterates that it is illegal to take anything from a recording to use it in another work. Also, she feels that doing so isn't creative. Apparently, she's not heard of Girl Talk.
Director of the NYU Department of Music, Dr. Lawrence Ferrara, called this ruling "extremely chilling," because this severe interpretation of copyright law sets the legal precedent that anyone who samples any work, no matter how little is used or how much the sound recording is manipulated, will be required to get a license to do so.
This case, as Dr. Ferrara points out, raises some interesting questions about intellectual property and copyright. Who really owns what? What is the purpose of copyright?
The Grey Album
In 2004, music producer Danger Mouse (probably best known as the skinny guy from Gnarls Barkley) made a mash-up album mixing samples of music from The Beatles White Album with vocal tracks from Jay-Z's The Black Album. He gave this work the fitting title The Grey Album, and passed it out (free of charge) to a few of his friends. Soon, the album had been uploaded to the Internet and within a few weeks it had been downloaded thousands of times.
Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan (Dr. V) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at NYU, and is an outspoken opponent of current copyright law. Dr. V cites The Grey Album as "the best example of the ways in which copyright law undermines everyone's interest."
Danger Mouse explains that he has always been interested in mixing different genres of music, and the idea to mix these two seemingly incongruous styles of music just came to him one day. For Danger Mouse, The Grey Album was an art project. He admits,
"It's very cultural as well. You have a very white thing (Beatles) and a very black thing, (Jay-Z) and they can make beautiful music together. It's very corny and very cheesy...but that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to change people's perceptions about music and what you can do. Hopefully, I'm getting there."Dr. V illustrates the massive audience that Danger Mouse created with this album,
"Ultimately, it was probably the most successful album of 2005. If it had sold, it might have been the biggest hit of the year."He then adds,
"Danger Mouse never made a dime. Nobody who copied or distributed the music ever made a dime. The Beatles never made a dime. Jay-Z never made a dime. The Beatles' lawyers must have made some money, but no one else did."Dr. V's argument is that copyright laws -- which were originally intended to incentivize artistic creativity by granting exclusive rights on their work for a short amount of time (the original 1790 US copyright law stipulated 28 years maximum) -- have now become tools for massive corporate control of media, in the end hindering creativity (like Danger Mouse's) rather than promoting it.
The Pirate Party
Dan Glickman is the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America. He discusses the constitutional foundation of copyright (which was the only substantive law in the original draft of the constitution), the amount of business the movie industry loses to piracy (he reports $6 billion in 2005), and how even though he knows piracy will never end, it is his aim to make piracy as difficult and tedious as possible.
Stopping off briefly in Russia, a shopkeeper explains how pirated films come to be sold in his shop. He says that some European videotapes a film in the cinema on opening night, sends the first half to the pirates in Russia, and if the pirates are happy with the quality of the copy and the price is agreed upon, the second half is sent. He admits that Russia's economy is about 30 years behind the rest of Europe, so this elaborate method for getting pirated copies may be a bit outdated elsewhere. The shopkeeper details the extent of piracy in Russia, explaining that out of 2,000 shops in his city; only about 30 of them sell original products.
In Sweden, the founders of The Pirate Bay explain the legal trouble they had over copyright law. The Pirate Bay is the most resilient filesharing tracker site in the world. These founders tell the story of how Swedish law enforcement officials, ordered by politicians who wished to appease the MPAA and avoid damaging international relations, raided The Pirate Bay's servers and took the site offline for a few days. The founders refused to cave in to the legal pressure exemplified with this raid and responded to it with apathetic actions and hostile discourse. The Pirate Bay recovered quickly, and due to a number of redundancies in the system, is now virtually impossible to take down.
In response to this raid, which some Swedish people described as "government betrayal," The Pirate Party was born. Founded by Rickard Falkvinge in 2006, the Pirate Party advocates only a few precepts:
- Today's copyright system is unbalanced. Copyright laws should only cover commercial uses of copyrighted material.
- Privatized monopolies are one of society's worst enemies. Patents are obsolete and should be abolished. Rather than recognizing the authority of pharmaceutical patents, we push instead for increased government support of research and development.
- All attempts to curtail privacy rights should be questioned and met with powerful opposition. Anti-terror laws nullify due process and risk being used as repressive tools.
- Overall mission: To promote global legislation to facilitate the emerging information society.
"Filesharing has pros and cons. The copyright infringement is a drawback, but if you fully get rid of copyright infringement the consequences are unacceptable. An old revenue stream for the entertainment industry is up against fundamental rights, such as privacy and correspondence, protection of whistleblowers and freedom of press. They think it is about one profession's right to get paid for its work, but this is not the issue. If you look at the advantages of filesharing, every citizen gets all knowledge and culture of the world at his fingertips. Each citizen is enriched in a way not seen since the advent of public libraries 150 years ago."Dan Glickman says,
"There is a growing movement particularly among younger people in Europe and in the United States about 'collective is free,' 'free is right,' 'sharing of information should be unrestricted.' If that comes in conflict with copyright, so be it!"Of course, Dan Glickman feels that the Pirate Party's take on copyright is completely wrong. At least, it is his job to regard any sentiment against current copyright law as completely wrong. What the Pirate Party contends is that even though there are unacceptable instances of copyright infringement -- made possible by modern technology -- the advantages of this technology and the access to knowledge and information it provides far outweigh any negative consequences of copyright infringement. The Pirates feel that you can't lock down the Internet because some people use it to share files that some companies want total control over -- the Internet is all about the free flow of information. To borrow from an old adage, it is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Creative Commons
Larry Lessig is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, previously he taught at Stanford Law School, and he is on the founding board of Creative Commons. Founded in 2001, Creative Commons seeks to give artists another option in determining how others can use their work. Picking from the suite of different Creative Commons licenses, an artist can establish how the work can be re-used, if it can be modified, which license derivative works must use, and whether derivative works can be used for commercial purposes or not. This simple toolkit allows content creators to migrate from an "all rights reserved" climate to a "some rights reserved" one.
Larry Lessig explains,
"Unlike some people in this movement, I fundamentally believe in copyright and its need in the digital age. The only problem is that it has become so expansive and so powerful that it can begin to actually inhibit creativity. We all understand in the context of texts (books) that, you put the text out there, copyright protects you from someone competing with you and selling the original book, but it ought to be free for people to use and reuse as they want. Those same norms have got to begin to be part of film and music, and graphics as well. What we should do is just update the law to make the law make sense with these technologies, and there are many creative ways to do that and ensure that artists continue to get paid."We will hear more from Larry Lessig in the next position paper blog, but it is important here to note that he represents a highly educated community of lawyers and media experts who feel that the best use for copyright is to make sure that no one takes and sells someone else's work as if it were their own. This is the main purpose of the original US copyright law -- to protect creators' rights to sell their own work, not to prohibit any and all use of that work for as long as (as it stands now) 120 years.
Nigeria
Ronaldo Lemos, professor of law at FVG Brazil, describes the movie industry of Nigeria:
"The Nigerian cinema is nowadays the largest movie maker in the world. The US produces 611 films per year. India produces around 900. Nigeria produces 1,200 films a year. The interesting thing is that all that happened without Nigeria having a copyright law."Charles Igwe is a film producer from Nigeria. He explains how huge Nigeria is (as many as 150 million people) and the need for such a large populace to have a method of producing their own cultural expressions. He says that Hollywood sells sex, drugs, violence, and the glorification of taking life. "In Nigeria," he says, "we don't make movies like that. We make movies that have genuine human stories and real family values. We don't make movies that celebrate killing. We make movies that make a difference."
Charles explains that even though Hollywood occupies the highest end of the film market, this leaves room for Nigerian film producers to work within the lower sections of the market. He says,
"My people say, 'You can't be taller than me and shorter than me at the same time.' you have to choose one. You (Hollywood) take the biggest piece of the market. You have that. But now there is another space to play around in. We occupy that space, quite gladly."Nigeria was the first country in the world to incorporate digital video as the sole method for producing feature films. Also, Nigeria began direct-to-video release long before anyone else did. At the Alaba International Market in Nigeria, shopkeepers will not sell pirated copies of Nigerian movies, only pirated copies of foreign films. Charles Igwe explains that genuine copies of Nigerian films cost the same as pirated copies, so people will not choose a pirated copy based on price. Also, the genuine copy of Nigerian movies are released and available at the same time as pirated copies, so people have no reason to buy a pirated version of a Nigerian film.
Charles also notes that there is a large market for Nigerian films in the US with African-Americans. He praises the Internet for giving Nigerian film producers the ability to share their work with people in the US, and around the world, where their work would have once been kept out of the cinemas by large, controlling film studios.
"These days you can access anything you want, any way you want, from anywhere in the world. So we have this portal that is valid for guys abroad, and I can reach them from here."Ronaldo Lemos finishes this look at Nigerian cinema with these words:
"Society is the biggest competitor for Hollywood, for the music industry, for the publishing industry. So, you have this new competitor that is everyone else. The law has been consistently changed for the past...12 years in order to protect certain very specific interests, especially for the North American cultural industry, in order to prevent society from becoming the producer of culture in itself and for itself."Brazil
In Brazil, the film follows music producer Beto Metralha and DJ Dinho, two of the key contributors to the soundtrack of the Tecno Brega (literal translation - "Cheesy Techno") movement. In his studio in Belem, Brazil, Beto demonstrates his method for creating a new song. He begins by hearing a song he likes on the radio. Then, he finds and downloads that song from a filesharing site (possibly Pirate Bay), he listens to the song on his computer to make sure it is suitable for remixing, and then decides how to manipulate elements of the song to make it fit into the tecno brega genre. In the film, Beto remixes the Gnarls Barkley song "Crazy," which is interesting, since Danger Mouse is half of Gnarls Barkley and he was featured earlier in the film. One of Beto's friends tells him the story of Danger Mouse and how his rise to fame came out of making The Grey Album without caring about copyright. Beto remarks, "He is lucky. He is also lucky that he's not in jail!"
Beto and DJ Dinho explain that in Brazil, artists don't make money from selling their music on disc. The artists merely drop off a copy of their new CD for the street vendors to copy and sell. What the vendors are actually doing by distributing pirated copies of pirated works is promoting specific music producers and DJs. Through strategic promotion, the vendors help bring more people to the weekend parties that happen in their area. With an average of 5,000 people at each party, these weekend parties are how the producers and DJs really make their money. We then see thousands of Brazilians enjoying and dancing to Beto's remix of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy."
Philosophical Round-Up
Before the film comes to an end, it cycles through some of the interviewees giving their final thoughts about copyright and the look of things to come.
Renaldo Lemos:
"When the band the Pixies reunited a couple of years ago, the entire press was raving about the fact that they were using a new business model. They were recording their concerts live, so your way out, you could buy CD of the concert you just listened to. The Tecno Brega movement had been doing that 4 years before the Pixies. The interesting thing about these emerging cultural industries is the fact that they are very innovative, in terms of business models. The whole industry has a lot to learn. Society as a whole has a lot to learn from these emerging cultural forms of production that are taking place in poorer areas of the world."Peter Jenner (Sincere Management):
"We have all got to rethink the way we do our business. It's not going to be easy. Companies are going to change hands, artists are going to squeal, other artists are going to make a fortune. It's going to be a very turbulent time. There's no question that there's a risk that copyright will just atrophy and die. No one will enforce it. We've got to think about it in an incredibly radical way so that it makes sense."Danger Mouse:
"For me personally, I'm kinda thrilled. But, I guess I'm on edge a little bit because I feel like I have to hurry up and do a lot of things because maybe things are going to change drastically. It's okay if it affects the business side of it, just hopefully the music won't get screwed up."Charles Igwe:
"You need to take a look at your environment, the limitations of your environment, the advantages of your environment...and then do things which are particular to you, and be proud of them."Dan Glickman:
"Clearly, people will not do things for free. It just defies human nature to believe that someone will come up and paint a picture, they'll do a statue, and they'll just give it away. Yeah, there might be a few people like that, but they probably don't eat very well."Larry Lessig:
"The Hollywood types say 'really strict control will grow the industry faster than anything.' But in fact, that's wrong. Freedom actually drives a more vibrant, important economy than restriction and control."Oliver Chastain (VP Records):
"I think the culture is changing. In the 60s, 70s, 80s, music had a much more individualistic style of approach. With the explosion of the Internet, there has been this culture of...it's like a 'mix-tape' culture. You borrow from that, you borrow from here, you make a mash-up on video, you post it on YouTube. Everybody becomes a creator by taking pieces here and there from other people. Forget whether they steal or not, that's a reality we're going to have to deal with for a long time."Girl Talk:
"I hear people and their songs on the radio right now with riffs that sound just like Black Sabbath, more so than me cutting up Bachman Turner Overdrive will sound like Bachman Turner Overdrive. I can manipulate these sources more so than people ripping off chord progressions can hide their sources. It's the same exact rule just different musical tools."Larry Lessig:
"57% of teenagers have created and shared content on the Internet. That's not people peer-to-peer filesharing -- that's about 99%. But this is actually people creating material and making it available. To the couch potato generation, this is bizarre; we can't imagine doing that. But to them, it's the natural way to understand the world and create. You can either call them 'criminals' or 'pirates' and use all the tools of the law and technology to block them from this creativity, or you can begin to encourage them by making a wide range of material available that gives them a much better understanding of their past and a much better opportunity to say something about the future."Dr. Lawrence Ferrara:
"Creativity itself is here on the line. Striking a balance between protecting the rights of those who own intellectual property with the right and the rights of generations of future, young and old people, to create is on the line."Pittsburgh
Back in Pittsburgh, Girl Talk sits at his computer. He announces that he's just downloaded a track from a Brazilian music producer that is the tecno brega version of Gnarls Barley's "Crazy." This brings the film into full circle. Danger Mouse, the guy who became famous and formed Gnarls Barkley by creating The Grey Album had his song remixed by a Brazilian music producer, which later gets re-remixed by Girl Talk, the DJ from Pittsburgh.
The final shot with Girl Talk huddled over his computer, playing with the beats that Beto created, shows how remixing creates an important, richly layered culture. These two people are complete strangers, but they are able to connect through music from different parts of the globe, thanks to the Internet.
Conclusions
This film takes a very careful, considered look at the issues around copyright law, and it provides what seems to be the logical conclusion that copyright law, while important to protect some commercial aspects of intellectual property, needs some serious cutting back in order to provide future creators with the tools necessary to make new expressions.
As we've seen with Girl Talk, Danger Mouse, Charles Igwe, NWA, Beto and Dj Dinho, creativity is alive and well in all parts of the world and in various economic conditions. People will create just to create; money doesn't necessarily motivate everything. This is important, because people like Dan Glickman don't understand motive without profit.
Larry Lessig reminds us that remixing is the method by which today's culture manifests its creative expression. We have the choice to make criminals out of artists using a common medium to make a statement, or we can relax control over media and allow creators (now and yet to come) the chance to create.
The film industry of Nigeria shows us that by an industry that respects its surroundings has a great opportunity to thrive. If box office ticket and DVD prices were to reflect the global economic depression, would more people be willing to pay for these things more often? Maybe. It can be argued that since not enough people in Nigeria have the equipment to post and download Nigerian films from the Internet, Charles Igwe doesn't have to worry about competing with 'free.' But the truth is, In Nigeria, watching a film on a disc at home is the experiential equivalent of going to the movie theaters in America. Home video is the experience they are willing to pay for; we pay for the experience of seeing a film in the theater. They are both the same. It is a social gathering and a chance to absorb culture together.
Beto and DJ Dinho in Brazil show, much in the same vein as the Nigerian film industry, that emerging economies are very malleable and innovative. They adapt to what they have and what they like, and even if they use another person's expressive work to make their own, the creativity behind their work is obvious.
Dr. Ferrara asked earlier: "Who really owns what?" and "What is the purpose of copyright?"
Copyright is not some horrible idea. It is good that authors and artists are able to rest easy, knowing that they won't have to compete with someone else over what they have spent time and energy creating. But a problem appears when a copyright owner wants absolute control over every use of their work, even work that doesn't compete or is so manipulated that it becomes something else. New additions to our cultural expression rely on what has been done before...and of course this is nothing new. Countless authors and screenwriters have stolen ideas from Homer's The Odyssey, or Moby Dick, or the Bible, or Ernest Goes to Camp --- we have always used the old to make the new. If we can expand our cultural library to make more media available, creators will have more to (legally) draw from.
The truth is, everybody owns creative expression. Once you take a glance at the Mona Lisa, you own a part of it. Your judgment of that painting, widely published or kept to yourself, becomes part of what that painting is. You'd most likely be arrested for taking the canvas, or the frame, or any physical part of it -- but the experience of seeing it is what gives the painting significance. A new, exciting experience will always have value. Physical objects tend to lose their value; just ask my expansive VHS movie library.
