Creativity, Circulation and Copyright: Sonic and Visual Media in the Digital Age: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
Over the past two decades, digital technologies have fundamentally altered the ways that musical and audiovisual media are created, circulated and received. As musical and audiovisual content has been made available in multiple formats through a variety of media platforms, there has been a multifaceted convergence of visual and sonic media, of production and consumption, and of corporate and grassroots artistic endeavours. Creators, promoters and audiences have responded in a variety of ways to the new challenges and opportunities. And, at the same times as media industries’ adaptive strategies are shifting users’ expectations and experience of audio-visual content, participatory use is constantly stretching and testing the legal frameworks of copyright law.
The Conference ‘Creativity, Circulation and Copyright’ aims to further interdisciplinary discussion of the relationship between the aesthetics, ethics and legal implications of new digital technologies through exploring several themes relating to the ways musical and audiovisual media are created, received and interpreted in the digital age.
Invited speakers: Martin Scherzinger (New York University), John Richardson (University of Turku), Kiri Miller (Brown University), Anahid Kassabian (University of Liverpool), Lionel Bently (University of Cambridge), Ananay Aguilar (University of Cambridge).
Lawrence Lessig set out to chart the hope and promise of the Internet in The Future of Ideas’ where he discussed different contexts for understanding the Internet as acommons’ where many free’ resources are able to enhance and develop creativity and innovation. These are contrasted to thereal space’ places affected by the online environment where creative activity takes place and the problem of further entrenchment of copyright laws to restrict the creative process and possibilities offered by the net. In further works Free Culture’ andRemix’ Lessig promotes and celebrates the idea of the re-use, adapting, resituating and contextualizing work to produce new ideas, culture and, of course, music. Using this starting point and contextualizing and contrasting this work with Toffler’s (1980) and Ritzer’s (2010) versions of the prosumer’, Lull’s emphasis on the central importance of creativehuman expression’, Castells (2001,2006) Network society’ and Boyd’s (2011)Networked publics’ This paper assesses these Sociological frameworks for their ability to illuminate and present us with tools to understand the processes of reintermediation, disintermediation and reorganization of the music industry and its creative networks. It also looks at the impact on the perceived structures and organization of the industry that various theorists have outlined (e.g. Dolata, 2012) and provides a critique of these positions around their lack of attention on the independent sector, music production techniques and the role of the musician (Katz, 2005)
Social media platforms such as YouTube have enabled music, images, and religious devotional practices to become conjoined in new and complex ways. This paper uses internet ethnography and multimedia analysis to explore the devotional practices surrounding several popular evangelical Christian worship music videos on YouTube. In these devotional videos, amateur creators overlay commercial audio recordings of their favorite congregational worship songs with a variety of visual effects, including moving imagery, film clips, still photographs, song lyrics, and bible verses. This paper sketches the shape of the new networked worship practices enabled by the creation and sharing of these small-screen devotional videos and highlights the broader social and economic implications of their use. I argue that the worship video can be regarded as a form of twenty-first century audiovisual iconography—a multimedia devotional resource that draws together the preexisting strands of evangelical visual piety surrounding mass-mediated devotional images and the 'worship lifestyle' invoked by commercial worship music recordings. By following worship videos’ complex pathways of circulation, I demonstrate the ways in which musical devotional practices are woven together as they move from the small screens of private worship to the large screens of public worship and back again. As these videos play an increasingly important role in (re-)mediating worship music, evangelical congregational worship is being transformed into a site of audiovisual convergence in which song lyrics, images, and music are combined into a powerful experiential whole. Religious audiovisual media insert themselves into the structures of daily life which enables them, in conjunction with a range of other offline practices, to shape embodied ways of listening, viewing, and worshipping.
In this paper, I will begin to theorise how small units of culture, such as the run-of-the-mill 3-5 minute uploaded video (which is suspiciously like the ‘required’ length of a pop song) or the ‘stupid game’ (Anderson, 2012), seem to swallow enormous amounts of time. While this phenomenon is widely discussed, it continues to grow without serious challenge. Using both the ideas of distributed subjectivity and listening as I developed them in Ubiquitous Listening as well as materials from neurology and psychology on time perception, I will argue that such small units of culture are nearly inevitable, given the prevalence of affect marketing and other developments that make longer attention spans increasingly difficult to maintain.
In this paper I review uses and definitions of close reading in music research and bordering fields in the context of contemporary digital culture. I argue that close reading practices should be elevated in status to something resembling cross-disciplinary methods like ethnography and discourse analysis. One reason for the apparent neglect of close reading is that it is perceived as hermetic to individual arts disciplines and implicitly promoting Kantian autonomy. New humanities approaches to close reading complicate such assumptions, however, by taking into account such factors as affective response and physical as well as discursive situation. In addition, close readings in new humanities research frequently take inter-art forms as their subject matter (e.g., films, gallery installations, environmental sound art, virtual reality), which demand that the analyst attend to crossmodal exchange. Following Mieke Bal, I argue that a concept- rather than theory-based approach has the greatest potential in cultural analyses because it is more adaptable to objects of study. The notion of framing, again from Bal but also Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman, holds considerable potential as a foundation for readings that interrogate their underlying assumptions while also “containing” all the relevant layers of an analysis. While close reading and narrative-based thinking are responses to printed media in the predigital world and essential means of accounting for experiences in deep and context-rich ways, we should nevertheless look also towards digital culture and what some have called hyper reading (James Sosnoski, N. Katherine Hayles), database thinking (Lev Manovich), and multimedia mentality (Nicholas Cook) in order to expand our ideas about cultural analysis in the present cultural climate. I argue, therefore, for a synergy of traditional and emerging approaches in order to grapple with questions relevant to current research. After Bateson and Gibson, I make a case for an ecology of close reading that, moreover, overlaps with matters of concern in ecocritical and ecomusicological research. The presentation is furnished with examples that illuminate the matters at hand.
The reach of private property rights, it seems, is widening. Over the last two decades, scholars in a variety of disciplines have tackled the impact of IP law on practices of politics, science, economics, law and culture. Not only has IP been extended to new information objects (from databases and software designs to biological seed lines, bacteria, genetically engineered life forms and DNA sequences), but the lengths of time for which protection is granted have been substantially extended for nearly all objects. At the same time, we witness today an outpouring of academic and popular scholarship in critical response to the widening reach of the IP concept. Like an evil twin, the progressive IP and cyberlaw scholarship calls for an expansion of the commons, emphasizes the productive delinking of cultural practice from cultural policy, and offers countervailing forces to the enclosure of the commons. Instead of identifying the expanding commons as inherently progressive, this paper argues that the peculiar comingling of the commons with its privatized antithesis productively underwrites new networks of exchange value. It is the opportunistic conceptual mélange between private property and public domain – whereby one side of the conceptual pole readily supplements (as alibi) for the other – that prevents the proper functioning of either conceptual principle in practice. Not property alone, but the very opposition between property and commons becomes the bastard concept for power. The paper describes contemporary cases of proprietary interests vested in anti-property as a paradoxical capitalist expansion of the laboring commons.
British copyright law has been criticised for privileging musical elements and practices that have been important in the conceptualisation of classical music, above those which have developed independently of that tradition. This conceptualisation has been associated with classical music’s aesthetic concept of the artwork: both law and the artwork treat composition as the culmination of creative genius, while performance is attributed little or no creative status. This asymmetry is further complicated by the domination of capital over labour in the protection of sound recordings, as copyright law vests authorship in the company that bears the costs of making and issuing the recording: performers are denied authorship over the record of their own performance. While the 1988 Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act introduced rights in performance, the depth and breadth of legal protection for performance-based musical practices, like most popular musics, remain limited. To overcome this asymmetry, commentators have focussed on how the concept of authorship might be extended to embrace collaborative practices that fall outside of the practices of classical music. My current project explores an alternative approach that places performers’ rights at the centre of the discussion. In this presentation I will attend to relevant case law to outline two main issues: firstly, the separation of creativity between composition and performance implied by these rights and, secondly, their relation to recent technological developments.
Determinations of who counts as an ‘author’ of a musical work has a number of legal consequences. Most obviously, it governs who count as the first owners of copyright, and thus who benefits from revenue streams associated with publishing/ recording (mechanicals) and performance (including broadcasting and streaming). Secondly, it is relevant to the duration of copyright – the term of copyright in music and lyrics being calculated by reference (i.e. currently seventy years after) the death of the author (or in the case of co-authorship the last author to die). Third, being an author entitles a person to be named as such when a work is published or recordings are distributed: authors are granted what is known as the ‘moral right’ of attribution. Copyright law has tended to assume that the legal concept of authorship maps onto a natural, flesh-and-blood, human beings. It thus is typically taken for granted that identifying who is an author for one purpose (say, ownership) necessarily operates to identify the author for other purposes (term, attribution). In so doing, the dominant arena for determining authorship concerns ownership. Here the rules have developed rather restrictively, so as to exclude from the category of authors a perhaps surprising range of contributions (as seen most clearly in the Spandau Ballet case, Hadley v Kemp). But the effect of such an approach is not just to exclude contributors from counting as owners, but also from being entitled to attribution. Certainly, one can see the logic in assuming that the word ‘author’ means the same thing in different parts of a statute, and indeed the convenience in so doing. However, if we consider the legal task of ascribing authorship as informed by matters of policy, the assumed unity or integrity of ‘authorship’ in copyright seems problematic. The policy considerations that underpin restricting who counts as an author in the three domains – ownership, term and attribution – are very different. By exploring these policies in more detail, I want to suggest that copyright law could respond more flexibly to a diverse range of creative practices if it recognised that the legal concept of authorship is not ‘natural’. One consequence of so doing might at least to be to afford rights of attribution to a wider array of contributors than are currently accommodated by the moral right of attribution.
Concerts in Second Life generally aim to reproduce the conditions of live music in real-world venues. The music itself, however, is made in the real word and streamed into Second Life, which problematises the idea of ‘live’ music. Rather than seeing it as irrelevant, Second Life residents have developed their own understanding of what liveness means, and the extensive debates through which this understanding has emerged illustrate the social construction of liveness in action. At the same time, technological limitations of the Second Life platform undermine the whole approach of reproducing real world concerts: the variable lag that is a permanent feature of Second Life means that accurate and predictable synchronisation of images, gestures, chat, and streamed sound is impossible. Co-authored by a musicologist and by the co-founder of the virtual band Redzone, and using one of Redzone’s performances as a case study, this paper argues that the most effective way to create liveness in Second Life is not to reproduce the conditions of real world performance, but rather to reconstruct liveness based on the technological affordances of virtual reality.