Watching Me, Watching You: Copyright and ‘Sampling’ in a Digital Era
JA
March 30
Back in 2003, Honda released its now famous Cog ad, executed by advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy to promote the new Accord model. The ad – effective, refreshing and painstaking staged – received immediate popular and critical acclaim, boosting sales and taking out a huge number of industry awards, including the Cannes Golden Lion and a Grand Clio. When it first came out, I remember thinking that the ad was wonderfully original; in fact it was one of the few ads that has stuck in my head simply because it seemed so creative. Yet, according to this article by Creative Review, Honda and Wieden+Kennedy have been plagued by accusations of plagiarism regarding the similarities of the Cog ad with this 1987 film Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go) by Fischli & Weiss.
Unsurprisingly, the Cog is by no means a stand-alone case. The net is awash with other examples of creative copying (or sampling, depending on where you stand). Creative Review also blogged recently about this ad for the Olympus PEN camera, which was ‘inspired’ by Taijin Takeuchi’s A wolf loves pork, another YouTube favourite. The similarities here are undeniable – not only with regard to the concept but also the execution. Both the ad/film progress in almost exactly the same way, right down to the clever ‘going up the stairs’ sequence and progression of upstanding photos across the floor. Yet Olympus, and their German ad agency DSG, only acknowledged the fact that the commercial was a ‘response’ to Tekeuchi after a flood of angry YouTube comments.
Reactions by ad agencies or authors who have been accused of borrowing have been varied from denial to apology to tokenistic acknowledgement. It’s curious to note that most of these issues are picked up by bloggers and threshed out in the comment boxes, as print doesn’t always have the space to cover every contested case. So far, the belief that big companies won’t poach from the little guy for fear of public backlash has proven fallible. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that they will, insofar as they can get away with it without loosing too much brand credibility.
The issues at stake here are complex and varied – too much so to go into in one blog post, even if I felt like I had all the answers (I don’t). The inability of old systems to cope with the leviathan that is the web has already been well documented (including this essay on ‘Copyright Free Riders’ by Lynne Spender, Vol 67/3, and ‘Copyright, Copyleft and Copygift’ by McKenzie Wark in the current March edition). What I’m interested in here is changing practices: what does creativity really mean in the digital era and to what extent are we entitled to use, sample or splice from the vast array of ideas available online? How do authors cope with these varied pressures? Has the internet changed this or simple exacerbated old problems?
On this last point I’m more likely to believe in the latter. Arguments over copyright are certainly not a condition unique to the web (J.K. Rowling has had her far share of plagiarism cases). I’m weary here of blaming the medium – as Sherman Young pointed out in the last Meanland lecture, it’s not necessarily the screen that’s the issue but our use of it. The web, with its infinite possibilities, laughs in the face of traditional copyright and has certainly spotlighted or at least transformed the very human urge to pinch stuff. As Gordon Comstock (writing under a pseudonym) pointed out on Creative Review, time and economic pressures can work their way into your head. The wealth of ideas available on YouTube, blogs, Flickr and even Twitter can, at times like these, seem irresistible. Equally, it’s worth mentioning that the practice of cutting and sampling is not a recent fad either, although again perhaps the web is bringing this to the forefront once more. Previous incarnations include notions of re-use from the Dadaist movement as well as the Beat Generation’s Cut-Ups.
Which brings me to another question – what sort of habits are we developing when it comes to use, and how is this reflected in our ethical lexicon? One interesting example is that of German author Helene Hegemann. When she was just 17, her debut novel Axolotl Roadkill leapt to the top of the bestseller lists in her home country and, in February, was shortlisted for a prestigious $20,000 prize of the Leipzig Book Fair. It was later discovered (again by a blogger) that Hegemann had lifted passages and sometimes entire pages from another novel called Strobo. Hegemann acknowledged that she should have been more open about her sources yet also defended herself by saying that she was simply ‘mixing’, not copying. To local newspaper Berliner Morganpost, she argued ‘I myself don’t feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context’, and again in a statement released by her publishers, ‘There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity’.
Some of you may also have read that popular site the Daily Beast recently fired one of their journalists, Gerald Posner, for similar accusations of ‘lifting’. Several articles published by Slate revealed that Posner had copied from other publications in at least five articles. Posner again acknowledged his error but said that he had ‘inadvertently’ plagiarised:
The core of my problem was in shifting from that of a book writer — with two years or more on a project — to what I describe as the "warp speed of the net." For the Beast articles, I created master electronic files, which contained all the information I developed about a topic… In the compressed deadlines of the Beast, it now seems certain that those master file[s] were a recipe for disaster for me. It allowed already published sources to get through to a number of my final and in the quick turnaround I then obviously lost sight of the fact that it belonged to a published source instead of being something I wrote.
Free use of online sources can often lead to great creative projects in themselves – adding another element entirely as well as sharing what was so good about the original in the first place. The issue for me is not so much who used what, but how best to acknowledged that use. There are cases where inspiration has been sourced, and the original creators incorporated from the get go. Creative Review links to one example with Roel Wouter, who was approached by Krow Communications to replicate a music video he once did for a Fiat Grande Punto ad. Even though he ended up saying no, Krow still acknowledged Wouter’s influence and paid him a licensing fee. Wouter later said:
I never thought they would copy it, but I think it is quite honest, they’re not acting as if they’ve come up with the idea themselves. Making the decision to do such an exact copy is weird but quite strong I think, it gives the feeling of a sincere tribute.
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Comments
30 Mar 10 at 0:48
This reminds me of the Sony play-doh bunnies kerfuffle a little while ago, which you can read about here and here.
I guess the distinction for a lot of people is drawn at the point at which profit is made from what appears to be someone else's idea. Derivative works that celebrate the original in some way without aiming to make a dollar would, I suppose, be completely acceptable to most folk. But as soon as these big companies begin to drawn heavy influence to expand their bottom line...well, that's taking a huge amount of hours of creative effort and reducing it in some intangible way.
Perhaps if the companies openly acknowledged the original artist, it'd be a little easier to digest? But then they may as well just commision them in the first place to create something original for them.
As far as literature is concerned, I posted an entry exploring that theme on my blog a little while ago which might be of some interest. It seems like the music industry is a pretty good analogy for any number of sectors: artists self-regulating, while the companies try and make a buck of whomever they think is pushing too far.
...30 Mar 10 at 12:12
Yes good point - digital culture seems to require two things: proper acknowledgement and not-for-profit use in order to be acceptable, although the lines blur according to every situation. It's when companies appropriate an idea for their own profit (eg. advertising) that we start to baulk, and I think this area is cause for the most confusion thus far. There are, for example, huge problems in even proving that a company used your work in the first place, let alone seeking some form of compensation.
I do still think that file sharing and the culture of linking/splicing is one of the best things about the internet, and that the issue is finding a balance between this and our desire to see artists benefit from their labour.
...31 Mar 10 at 14:46
The whole debate over 'appropriation' and copyright seems to have been going on for ages, with no end in sight ... and the web certainly has had an impact on how that debate has developed ... for 'really old' references in Meanjin you could go back twenty years to the three paper contribution from David Saunders, Gillian Whitlock & myself back in 1989 "Double Trouble" Meanjin Vol.48 No.2 (Winter 1989).
The focus on 'digital culture' often misses the fundamental tension between a general process of copying an idea, appropriating a specific 'expression' of an idea and the particular contstraints of copyright law. What Jessica's post highlights is that the web is not the cause of most of the approriation cases she cites, but that it makes it easier to identify them.
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