In early January, Jonathan and I were invited to speak on a panel at  World’s Fair Use Day in Washington, DC to provide the perspective of artists who use copyrighted material in their work. Our panel followed Congressman Mike Doyle’s (D-Penn) keynote address on defending Fair Use against ongoing attacks from corporate media interests. It was also a great opportunity to chat with our friends, Mark Hosler from Negativeland and Dan Walsh from Garfield Minus Garfield.

It was the very end of a long day when we were pleasantly reminded of these two remixes brought to our attention by cultural critic Mark Dery, who coined and popularized the term Culture Jamming:

Scary Mary, created by MovieMker, remixes Mary Poppins into a horror film. It is not overtly political but it is a fun example of how additive text and a new soundtrack can turn the carefully crafted Disney-fied world on it’s head.

It’s Raining Men is a simple yet articulate comment on the prevalence of men (and scantly clad ones at that) in the movie 300. Suburbala paired the film’s footage with the famous song by the same name, queering the gaze of the Trogans and satirizing their hyper-masculinity to reveal the homoerotic subtext of the movie.

For more on the one-day conference hosted by Public Knowledge, check out the web-cast from the First Annual World’s Fair Use Day.

Category: About Remixing
Topic Tags: fair use, government, negativland

Public Knowledge has just released their new series of four video interviews called “We Are Creators Too” that focuses on artists who push the boundaries of copyright law. First to be featured was Nina Paley whose Sita Sings the Blues feature film (set to music from the Public Domain) reveals the timelessness of an old Indian folk tale while simultaneously exposing the archaic nature of copyright. Francesca Coppa, fan, academic and keeper of women’s vidding herstory is also featured along with Jonathan and myself.

Public Knowledge is a great resource for remix artists and vidders because they acknowledge that Fair Use is a right, not a privilege. As artist, we can only continue making new work with the hopes that the product and process decreases copyright confusion and encourages the use of new media technologies to sustain media literacy and critical thinking about popular, and proprietary, culture.

Part 4 – Francesca Coppa

Part 3 – Jonathan McIntosh

Part 2 – Elisa Kreisinger

Part 1 – Nina Paley

Category: About Remixing
Topic Tags: activism, copyright, corporations, fair use, REMOVED, rights, television, vidding

Why it Takes Three Weeks to Post Your Youtube Video

In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots.

On July 21^st I posted a remix video to Youtube called “Super Pork and Beans All-Stars.” It was a remixed version of Weezer’s popular Pork and Beans music video, which is owned by Universal Music Group (UMG) – my version was made of new footage that I manipulated to match the song.

Immediately after the upload, Youtube’s copyright bots recognized the UMG song on my soundtrack and disabled my video. Youtube has a built-in online tool for copyright disputes, so I used that to tell them that my work was fair use and should not have been removed. My movie was put back online right away,  but the dispute process wasn’t over.

YouTube forwarded my dispute to UMG and I was surprised to find out that UMG replied back only a day later. They told Youtube that they owned the song and that I was not allowed to use it without permission. Such a quick response from UMG makes me suspect they’re using more bots to respond automatically to Youtube’s built-in disputes. After UMG’s response, my movie was automatically taken down once again.

Luckily for me I had already learned how to deal with this from Owen Gallagher, who runs totalrecut.com and has successfully fought other Youtube takedowns. On July 23^rd, I followed Owen’s example and sent Youtube a DMCA counter-notice. These counter-notices need to be formatted in a specific way to be considered legitimate, otherwise it’s at Youtube’s discretion whether or not they ignore you. You can find a guide to how the DMCA counter-notices work at Chillingeffects.org.

I was finally notified that my video was going back online on August 12^th — around 21 days after my original posting. A big chunk of that was spent waiting for UMG to meet their DMCA-imposed deadline to seek legal action against me if they found my video to be infringing. Thankfully, nobody has yet invented a bot that can take you to court, so the deadline lapsed and my video back went online, hopefully for good.

In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

So I got a happy ending, but imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek. How willing would I be to dig through Youtube’s site to find the automated dispute process? And once that automated dispute got rejected, how willing would I be to research the precise criteria required to send my counter-notice in a format that Youtube couldn’t ignore? And if I had to do this for multiple videos, and wait three weeks per submission, who could blame me for concluding that Youtube just wasn’t the place to reliably distribute my work?

Youtube is actually one of the more obliging sites for providing tools and instructions on how to exercise your fair use rights, but even there it’s a small research project for any user who may want to fight back. Meanwhile major labels aren’t even bothering to hire staff to make sure they’re not taking down legal videos. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued other content companies for abusing copyright in this way, but that has not been enough to deter the massive automated takedowns.

Others have already proposed an important step toward fixing this problem: replace the current “notice-and-takedown” laws with “notice-and-notice” ones. If UMG wants to take people’s videos down, users should have a chance to dispute it  before the content is removed. There should be no pressure on service providers to take down legal content. This ought to be a minimum, uncontroversial step, even if we put aside other legitimate arguments for expanding fair use and reducing copyright terms. Internet users should not have to fight uphill battles to keep legal videos online just so a handful of labels can save on staffing costs.

[This is a guest post for PRV by video remixer IKAT381]

Category: articles
Topic Tags: copyright, corporations, fair use

I thought I would share my talk on Political Remix Video at Ars Electronica 2008 in Linz Austria for the New Cultural Economy Symposium. The talk was titled “Building a Critical Culture with Political Remix Video” and there is a youtube playlist on my user page including all the videos I presented in case you want to favorite, comment on or share them.

In this presentation I try to showcase Political Remix Videos that, I think, transcend the standard topics of government, elections or policy and instead highlight issues of racism, injustice, environment and mainstream media. I felt is was important to present and discuss works that focus on issues relevant to marginalized and oppressed communities inside the United States – specifically videos by Jackie Reem Salloum, The Black Lantern and Theodore Lyons.

I would also like to note that at the beginning of my talk I neglected to include a shout-out to the African American hip-hop communities that perfected and popularized remix as a art form and helped infuse it into our culture over the past several decades. An important point that, I think, should be included in any discussion of remix culture. Oh and in the talk I mispronounce Aaron Valdez’s name, apologies for that Aaron.

You can watch my talk above or via the video stream coming directly from the Ars website in wmp format.

Category: video talks
Topic Tags:

Our fair-use-advocating friends over at the Center for Social Media have just released a document called “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video” which helps creators and especially, I think, political remixers interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use.

Although people participating in creating Political Remix Video may have a good sense of fair use already, many new comers to the medium, grassroots political organizations and activist campaigners are still hesitant to use copyrighted material in their media work because of the fear of legal reprisals. Hopeful this code with help shed some clarifying light on fair use rights for us all.

These guidelines are fantastic to have. Still I would encourage all DIY cultural creators and media transformers to push the legal limits – to draw outside the lines – of fair use and the law as far as is necessary in the name of participatory media and social justice.

You can download the Code of Best Practices here:
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/fair_use_in_online_video/

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Category: resources
Topic Tags: fair use