Neil Gaiman: “Places where I was being pirated… I was selling more and more books.”

(Note: this blog post grew out of a lively conversation on the cpsc184 email discuss list. Credit goes to Jacob Albert for pointing to the original article on the German author and starting the discussion.)

A few days ago, the New York Times reported on young German novelist Helene Hegemann, 17, who had made it to the bestseller list despite criticism over plagiarism, including lifting an entire page from another work without citation. While instances of plagiarism are no means unique, what made this case interesting is that while Hegemann apologized for not citing her sources, she also explained that she was part of a younger generation that freely remixes culture and information. On the discuss list, Elizabeth asked about the ethical questions of not citing and helpfully pointed to a Harper’s article by Jonathan Lethem that situates the act of borrowing from other authors and artists in a long historical tradition, and Brendan suggested that perhaps contemporary remixes should be understood within this artistic tradition.

To respond to this last point, I think there’s an important difference between traditional remixes from the past (i.e. literature, art, and everything else Lethem discusses) and the remix culture on the internet. It’s true that remixing is centuries old and artistically valid, but in the article Hegemann argues that there’s something about this digital generation which is distinct. The relevant question then is to ask is what is different about new technology that changes cultural attitudes about remixes.

I would argue that it is the conception of authorship that has shifted, transformed by the cultural networks created by new technologies. In the recent pre-digital past, the standard was that some defined person or group created a work and was considered the author of the work. Even if an object was cobbled together from many different sources, there was always some identifiable creator recognized as source. For example, even though Shakespeare or Burroughs or the Dadaists borrowed from other work, we still identify them as the authors of the original piece which resulted, and we understand that it is their genius and creativity which made something new out of the old.

Contrast that situation with cultural attitudes about authorship surrounding digital memes. When someone decides to make another lolcat or other kind of meme the user often posts anonymously and there’s no obligation to cite the original source–indeed the original author is usually obscure, unknown (nobody knows who came up with “I can haz cheezburger“) and most importantly irrelevant. What matters is not the sense of individual authorship but rather the self-referentiality of the community as a whole. As Alex Leavitt makes clear in an article on digital memes that Elizabeth sent out, memes only make sense in terms of “subcultural networks,” and identifiable authorship is secondary. Hegemann’s assertion that, “there’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity” can only work in this digital context. In the pre-digital age, it would have been absurd to say that T.S. Elliott created nothing original because he took from other sources, and part the reason is that the concept of authorship was so enshrined.

We can use this distinction of conceptions of authorship to answer some of the ethical questions surrounding plagiarism. In the pre-digital age, it was more necessary to cite your sources, because those authors too were understood as being original and creative. Thus, not sourcing them was to appropriate their originality and therefore plagiarism. But in a digital memetic community, plagiarism doesn’t make any sense as a concept–if there is “no such thing as originality,” then there is no such thing as appropriation from others and further there is no assertion that the work is “your own.” In a memetic community, citation isn’t an ethical question because plagiarism cannot exist.

What is interesting with Hegemann’s situation, however, is that it actually doesn’t fall neatly into either one of these distinct conceptions of authorship–she borrows parts of both. On the one hand, the form she is using, the book, has a long tradition of valuing authorship. In our age, books are understood as the formal expression of a person or group of persons and it is hard to escape that (for example, even if you want to publish anonymously, you still usually would use a pen name). On the other hand, her conception of authorship has been influenced by digital communities (the internet, D.J.’s, Berlin youth culture, etc.) which do not necessarily value authorship and therefore do not place importance on citation. Thus, I’d argue that the reason that this example is so controversial is that it is a site where two conceptions of authorship are coming into direct conflict. Attribution is the locus of this conflict because it marks one’s allegiances–citing sources signals a traditional understanding of authorship, not citing signals a digitally influenced understanding of authorship.

Paul Ramirez

If you come to the Net armed with the idea that the old system of copyright is going to work just fine here, this more than anything is going to get you to recognize: you need some new ideas.

–Lawrence Lessig on ThruYou

With hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded every day, YouTube represents a vast resource for mashup artists, producers, and now even consumers to sample, remix, and invent new contexts for existing visual and audio works. Sampling and remixing has been in wide practice for decades now, but new end-user mashup tools are changing both the speed and exposure of the medium, as even relative amateurs are able to produce and disseminate remixes without complex software or technical knowledge.

There are already an increasing number of artists working exclusively from user generated, or amateur, content sourced from YouTube and other media sharing websites. An often-cited example is Kutiman’s ThruYou, a site built entirely from existing YouTube clips. The site’s design even references YouTube as seen here:

There are also artists such as DJ Mike Relm who use YouTube to remix both songs and video live. Although most of the examples I found seem to rely on a lot of pre-prepared material the concept of live djing with YouTube as your infinite record crate is a promising one.

In the past year, new websites have made this kind of remixing even simpler, allowing anyone with access to a web browser to create mixes of multiple YouTube clips on the fly. I was first made aware of this phenomenon through YouTube Doubler, shown here with a mashup of Usher’s Papers with the widely trafficked Man Goat meme:

A similar site, twoyoutubevideosandamotherfuckingcrossfader.com, provides the same basic functionality but allows the user to control the mix between the two clips. As these tools become increasingly sophisticated, it will become more and more difficult to police the Internet to the standard set forth in Bridgeport v. Dimension.

I believe sites such as YouTube Doubler would not be subject to copyright law, as they are merely linking to existing content hosted on YouTube. For example, if Usher’s record label wanted to remove his song from the mashup cited above, they would likely have to make their case against YouTube. And to be clear, uploading Papers verbatim to YouTube is not, and probably should not be, considered fair use. But the mashup of this content could be considered parody and therefore should be protected by the first amendment.

The issue becomes complicated, however, by the fact that the instance parody exists only on the end-users computer, where both clips are played simultaneously. Although each clip may be subject to copyright protection, it is through the resulting combination that a new, transformative, work is generated.