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Here’s just a short excerpt from my paper:

Jonathan Lethem explicitly describes the pseudo-originality that our copyright law so avidly protects.  Essentially, he argues that no creative work is purely original in its own right.  There are adaptations, guided inspirations, derivations, and downright replications.  But all of this is okay, and honestly, essential for the furthering of our understanding of artistic culture.  Lethem goes on to list classic works that reached popular and artistic prime: The Honeymooners to The Flinstones to The Simpsons; “Pyramus and Thisbe” to Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story; Plutarch to Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot.  “If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.”  Ultimately, copyright law protects original, creative, and tangible works, along with a slew of fair use regulations, but Lethem still regards these laws as the impetus to “usemonopoly”.  Lethem states, “The idea that culture can be property—intellectual property—is used to justify everything….Plagiarism and piracy, after all, art he monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.”  Our society, similar to Becker’s argument that we attribute creativity to one artist, has come to accept a very narrow working definition of creative works.  Lethem goes on to say that, “copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation….Copyright is a ‘right’ in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results.”  It seems that Lethem is arguing that, while copyright was intended to protect the works of artists, it also hinders them from their original purpose in publishing or creating their works: to provide a richer culture for society to soak in.

Lethem concludes his article with a poignant argument (as paraphrased from Saul Bellow), “Don’t pirate my editions; do plunder my visions.  The name of the game is Give All.  You, reader, are welcome to my stories.  They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.”  We are entering an age where the laws that originally meant to protect do more hindrance than good.  We see that copyright law neither protects completely nor accommodatingly, but it is a work in progress, and hopefully it will reach the day where there is a good balance between protecting authors that have already contributed, and artists who have yet to contribute to the common cultural good.

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The primary, illegal uses of the mp3 are not aberrant uses or an error in the technology; they are its highest moral calling: ‘Eliminated redundancies! Reduce bandwidth use! Travel great distances frequently and with little effort! Accumulate on the hard drives of the middle class! Address a distracted listening subject!’

Sterne’s presentation of the mp3, both in terms of philosophical and technical purpose, was extremely helpful for me to better process the origin of the audio container technology.  Unlike many other technologies, which are designed to fill an existing need but still result in collateral damage, mp3s still fulfill the original purpose that MPEG established over 20 years ago: standardization and maximum compatibility.  It was designed to free us from the commodity-based mentality of the use-value and exchange-value paradigms.  The continuous bifurcation of exchange-value and use-value end up destroying each other, according to Attali.

I liked reading Sterne’s article, especially because he delved deeper than just the surface controversy of mp3s.  His comparison of mp3s to mollusks hit home for me (yes, I know it’s an odd analogy, but it works).

This is key: although mp3s exist as software, people tend to treat them like objects (and indeed, the argument here is that we should analyze them as artifacts) perhaps because they are used to handling recordings as physical things.

It is indeed the micromaterialization of the mp3’s presence that causes me to think this way as well.  I don’t refer to my music library as 40 gigs of compressed audio files or as 320kbps tracks.  I still refer to my music in terms of albums, artists, and track numbers.  The simulation of mp3s as material objects pushes the technicalities of each file to a secondary position.  I won’t talk about the technical details of a song unless I’m specifically asked for it.

I also hold the mentality that my mp3s tend to be temporary substitutes to albums I plan to physically buy in the future.  Most of the time, I will test out an album in mp3 form with every intent to purchase a tangible CD if I feel it is worth the price.  This of course ties my mp3 mentality back to one of commodification, but I feel that the divide here is interesting.  Ultimately, while I’m neither an audiophile nor a music pack rat, I feel that people’s views of mp3s versus CDs is dependent their particular circumstances, whether they are casual listeners or audio connoisseurs.

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This post was mostly inspired by the article by Lethem that we read for class.  While reading the article, I wanted to think of works of art as art themselves (looking at it from the perspective of waning creativity, not necessarily copyright and plagiarism).

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

This quote from Jonathan Lethem’s article “A Plagiarism” made me want to consider the wide variety of film and story remakes from over the years.  One specific example that came to mind was the progressively modern use of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.  As a story originally co-written, edited, and directed by Akira Kurosawa, the Seven Samurai is considered one of the greatest and most influential films of all time.  A little over 5 years after its release in 1954, John Sturges directed the classic American Western tale The Magnificent Seven.  In 2004, Studio GONZO released its animated series Samurai 7.  Both of these works are highly regarded as works of art in their respective media, but how much can and should be accredited to the original work done by Kurosawa?

It would be unfair to label a work as “uncreative” simply because the story and plotline were taken from a previous work.  It’s clear that Sturges and GONZO took creative liberties in creating their respective adaptations of Kurosawa’s original.  Clearly both The Magnificent Seven and Samurai 7 had legal basis to be created (or else they would neither exist nor have received the critical accolades that they did), and they exist as throwbacks to Seven Samurai.  But my question is more morally based than legal: how much credit do these creators deserve when a significant portion of the reason they received praise was because of another man’s work?

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