Page 368 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

P racy and Intellectual Property |

ThE PrinTing PrEss
While we have been creating, expressing, and inventing for millennia, legal
protection of exclusive use rights to ideas and their representations only devel-
oped as a response to changes in the notion of authorship brought about by the
rise of liberal individualism and the invention of technologies for mass repro-
duction such as the Gutenberg printing press.

ThE auThor

By making reproduction more time and cost efficient, the printing press greatly
increased the distribution of texts, creating legal problems in publishers’ com-
peting claims to the rights to copy remarkably similar manuscripts acquired
from different “authors.” In response, Britain’s 1709 Statute of Anne—the first
copyright law—shifted the right to copy from publishers to “authors.”
This legal creation of “the author” established a tension between the cultural
commons and individual acts of creativity by suggesting that creative work can
be quantified and judged in terms of how it exceeds the culturally common ele-
ments and ideas from which it is composed. When can someone claim their
rendition of a song they heard from someone else as their own? How do we
measure the difference? Can we own a five-note sequence? One note? Is borrow-
ing a beat “fair use”?

DigiTaL samPLing

As with the printing press, the development of digital samplers led to legal
disputes over the use and ownership of culturally common expressions, reiter-
ating in the musical realm the problems of recognizing sole authorship. Hip-
hop has a rich history of sampling, from deft disc jockeying to mix tapes, but
the confluence of affordable audio reproduction technologies and the breakout
popularity of records that sampled other music, such as the Beastie Boys’ 1986
Licensed to Ill, publicized the threat IP protection poses to artistic expression.
Even now, long after the Supreme Court’s 1994 ruling in favor of 2 Live Crew’s
fair-use claim to guitar, bass, and drum samples from Roy Orbison’s “Pretty
Woman,” musicians are still threatened for their use of samples. Danger Mouse’s
The Grey Album—a mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and samples from the
Beatles’ The White Album—has been the target of litigation by EMI, which owns
the rights to the Beatles’ songs. Other music we never get a chance to hear. Public
Enemy pulled the track “Psycho of Greed” from their 2002 album Revolverlution
because of the exorbitant fee for using a sample from the Beatles’ “Tomorrow
Never Knows.”
Our “rip, mix, and burn” culture suggests that many of us engage with these
same processes of remixing and sharing cultural expressions, which blur the
line between the commons and private ownership. Expanding IP protections
attempt to redefine this line and to set the conditions for assessing the legality
of our engagement with our own culture. Critics charge that instead of serving