If you’ve got 80 minutes to spare, watch RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a probing investigation into how culture builds upon culture in the information age.
If you’ve got 20 minutes to spare, watch Professor Lawrence Lessig‘s TED Talk, where he shows how current laws strangle creativity.
But if you’ve only 3 minutes to spare, watch Madeon‘s live mashup of 39 songs while asking yourself this: Should each of the sampled artists have the power to demand this video be removed due to copyright infringement?
This digital video art titled ‘Oops’ by Chris Beckman is composed entirely of appropriated YouTube videos, seamlessly stitched together via a motif of camera drops, which according to the artist “serves both as transportative adventure and metaphorical elucidation of YouTube itself (i.e. endless related videos) exemplifying the Internet’s infinite repository of ‘throwaway’ social documentation”. This work was awarded a 2010 Vimeo Award.
This does not reference the original. This isn’t an homage. This is the lazy man’s way of looking creative without actually being creative. It’s copying someone else’s work down to the smallest detail and hoping no one will notice.
Suing YouTube for 1 billion dollars, Viacom in their opening statements (which have been made public today) claimed the leading video site does not do enough in dealing with copyrighted material; To which YouTube retorted:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
