Remix and Repent

Part One of Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy begins with an anecdote familiar to our class. Stephanie Lenz made a video of her son, a toddler, toddling to a song by Prince. The video file was too big to email to her family, so she published it to YouTube. This marks an obvious threat to the music industry, the freedom of artists to create without risking their works be manipulated and de-contextualized, and, of course, the livelihoods of every hard-working man and woman at Universal Music Group. Universal responded with the only power at its disposal, letter writing. They wrote to YouTube, demanding that the video be removed from the Internet, and YouTube complied to avoid liability (2). The economy was saved, and we can all rest easy knowing that artists will continue to create quality cultural products without fear.

I’m awful at sarcasm, but in reality, the clip Lenz used in her video was too short and of too poor a quality to pose a threat to one performer, the music industry, and the Western way of life. Nobody could conceivably “get around” buying the song by listening to the sound from the YouTube video. In fact, I was so curious about the video that I looked it up on YouTube. Good tune. I think I’ll go to iTunes and buy it.

Let’s not call this video art or advertising, but let’s pay attention to some of Lessig’s points about the validity, if not the necessity, of remix in achieving certain cultural phenomena. Lenz may have composed a song herself and posted the video without any problem. That would have been impressive as well as cute. But the song carries with it a cultural significance that any composition by Lenz would have to cultivate for itself. Lessig notes the “mimetic effect” (74) of remixes that play on the viewers’ awareness of the cultural products being remixed.

In this case, a baby is dancing around to a song by a guy who used to wear pants with no butt. Bright yellow ones. Plus, the song lyrics make this even funnier: “So when you call up that …Instead of asking him how much of your time is left? / Ask him how much of your mind, baby / 'Cause in this life things are much harder than in the afterworld…” How would a baby gain from this advice? Or does dancing to this song mean that the baby is endorsing it? Wise baby.


Now, imagine that previously encoded cultural significance were being used by someone who was intentionally making a statement. If this phenomenon is so potent even by accident, the cultural significance of remix must be great.

But, as Lessig points out, the architecture of copyright laws stands in the way of this sort of self-aware cultural activity. Oh, it still happens, and because it happens so often, copyright laws rarely “win” their war (110), but this legal architecture results in an environment in which producers of culture must play the role of criminal (114). Young people simply cannot enjoy the RO (Read/Only) culture Lessig describes (28), not only because they know about RW (Read/Write) culture and all of its capabilities, but also because the tangible aspects of our culture allow for it. It’s way too easy to outlaw.

 For years, we enjoyed cultural products through analog channels. Record albums came out the way boomers think they always should, in albums that you open up like a big book filled with vinyl and photos and sometimes song lyrics. The law didn’t really care what you did with it, because, first of all, it had no way of knowing what you did with a piece of cardboard any vinyl in your own home. Buying, installing, monitoring, and maintaining all of the analog equipment to surveil everyone who left Sam Goody with the new Iron Butterfly record just wasn’t worth it. Similarly, the process of reproducing or manipulating records or films was prohibitively complicated and expensive (37). I remember being amazed at music videos in the 1980’s. I asked me dad how there could be so many different things happening on the screen while only one song played. He said, with a tone of polite exasperation, “lots of teamwork.”

Anyway, that question sounds ridiculous to me now, too. Digitally distributing culture allows consumers of that culture massive amounts of control over it. With programs like Popcorn Maker, Camtasia, and wevideo, making videos like MTV is as simple as messing around with a four track recorder in the 90’s.

The problem here is that as we enjoy the increased malleability of cultural products in the digital arena, we do so publicly. Why bother expending the energy to create a remix if nobody is going to see it? If I only show it to people while we are together, bypassing the need to post it online, then is anyone really seeing it? I don’t think so. That’s just not enough.

Even the products we don’t remix have different lives in the digital arena. With paper books, like I said above, you can keep anyone from knowing what you do with it. Unless you photocopy entire books and sell them on the corner, enjoy. But with digital technologies, “every use of creative work technically produces a copy, and every use of creative work technically triggers copyright law” (103). When we “buy” an ebook, we don’t really buy a book; we secure our access to a file that must copy itself every time we use it, either by copying itself to a hard drive or to a screen. We could even print out pages, which makes even more copies. Similarly with a song, it becomes increasingly more the case that our music streams from some source, rather than being stored on a hard drive. We can subscribe to Pandora or whatever, but we don’t own a thing except permission to access material.

The owners of this culture have the right to restrict our access to media, which means they have a right to shut down online RW culture. They have the right to, but they probably won’t be able to. There’s just too much RW culture. The owners of culture can, however, stigmatize RW cultural expression, thereby stymieing its production or, even worse, making criminals out of those who just want to break free from the consumer/television set relationship RO culture has made appear normal.

But if Yoko Ono wants to make it difficult for anyone to use her husband’s work, good for her. If she had married an insurance salesman (or even less successful musician), she probably wouldn’t be a widow. You don’t get shot for popcorn maker videos.