The fact that there are so many words to refer to the reproduction of material speaks to the concept being nebulous and hard to define. Kennedy’s article uses appropriation, open-source, borrowing, and of course copyright and each contains a value judgment about the act of using someone else’s material to create your own. To determine and promote boundaries of appropriation for any kind of material, it must first be considered how ownership may impact the material itself and whose material benefits from ownership. In the case of mash-up video, a process through which original source material is sliced and reassembled to form a new narrative, ownership may force a money-driven crowdsourcing valuation system onto an otherwise benign user-determined source of amusement.
Justice Potter Stewart’s famous statement of “I know it when I see it” (Roth v. United States) regarding the complex definitions of obscenity applies to debates about ownership in that it can be argued that ownership is only definable on a medium-by-medium contextual basis. Kennedy’s article is anchored in examining ownership of text, as is copyright law in general dating back to the Renaissance. In its earliest conception copyright applied mostly to printable, portable and thus sellable works of art (Macmillan 97). Sculptures and paintings were generally commissioned, therefore the creator earned their fee and that was their finite financial gain made from the piece. Therefore text was the primary basis for the development of copyright law.
At that time, non-text visual media like sculptures were difficult to reproduce en masse therefore copyright laws were not well-suited to protect that kind of art. With a sculpture, the original work intrinsically holds higher value than copies because it is a “unique object” whose “materiality” can never be precisely reproduced (Macmillan 112). This is unlike printed “immaterial” works like books whose value—and thereby, ownership—lies in the content, not the actual manuscript itself.
Regarding digital media, although videos are definitely visual, as are paintings and sculptures which have materiality, videos align more sensibly with immateriality. Cheap technology allows the video material to be extracted and replicated with exactness: it is the precise original frame, especially as physical film becomes more obsolete. Just as David Shields in Kennedy’s article takes pride in his cut-copy-paste lyrical novel, any interested user can create her own mash-up from any number of video and audio sources and distribute them on YouTube. The immateriality of videos means the source material should be awarded ownership similar to text when it is appropriated.
The speed with which mash-ups can be created and disseminated makes it difficult for the owners of the source material to monitor them, which explains part of why mash-ups are allowed to stay online (Renzetti). Only the people who own and therefore hold the right to profit from the original source videos can host them online, and unauthorized re-postings of original, un-mashed videos are taken down by a party working for the owners. If re-posting the original violates the original artist’s ownership (plus that of record labels, producers, distributers etc.), why then are mash-ups allowed to stay online when they utilize or even obliquely reference source material? These Frankenstein videos either mimic the source material to attract viewers or they incorporate actual butchered clips that are rearranged or sometimes simply have alternate audio layered over them. If no one profits from the mash-ups then perhaps the question of how ownership would apply to them is irrelevant. However if profits could be made from mash-ups, then their transformation from amateur material to owned material to profited-from material must be considered in order to understand the impact of ownership on this type of borrowed, hacked and re-stitched material.
A YouTube search of “Single Ladies” by Beyonce Knowles yields almost half a million videos, however only one is the original and it is hosted by Vevo. Vevo is a website that attracts high-end advertising by promising that users will only see the video through Vevo which is, in fact, YouTube powered by Google (Rosoff). This cleaned-up video-sharing option allows high-paying advertisers to rest assured that their consumers will see the ads because the video cannot be reproduced on myriad other websites and users whose duplicates of original videos do not contain the ads. While Vevo hosts the only original posting of the “Single Ladies” video, the remaining near-half million videos are a combination of mash-ups, remixes, and amateur dance and/or singing performances of the music video.
These reincarnations are allowed, which begs the question why bother creating ownership—and therefore profitability—of the original when there is no ownership or profitability of the mash-ups? To that end, Vevo also seeks out exclusive hosting for some of these remix videos as long as they seem “professional” and have money-making potential. Providing the exclusive hosting assigns ownership to otherwise unclaimed material, but more importantly evaluates the material itself as being of worth to someone other than the user. And by contrast, unselected material is deemed worthless and shoved further down the search results list to be viewed by fewer people.
A core consequence of Vevo’s original and mash-up ownership model is that ownership of material is braided with its financial value, both in terms of profitability and the amount of money and resources the creator had when creating the material. If something is worthless by Vevo’s parameters, such as the 12,348th cell phone video of a grandma in Hong Kong shaking it to “Single Ladies”, it is not sought out for ownership. It will not earn advertising money and it has no production value, so who cares if anyone owns it? Regardless of whether an individual cares whether she owns her mash-up or not, the fact that it is not worthy of Vevo’s selection puts a value judgment on the video’s worth, even beyond dollars. Not only is the material not worth any money, it is also not worth being elevated out of the YouTube marshes and onto a more elite platform with far better exposure. Vevo has not only found an effective way to make money off of creating ownership of superstar videos that can otherwise be so easily and rapidly shared and therefore cheapened; but Vevo has also established a framework through which ownership of mash-ups equals value, and lack of ownership equals worthlessness.
Spring-boarding from Rushkoff’s lecture, the process of creating ownership over new media such as video mash-ups forces the media and its creators into a consumer paradigm through which their work could be—even if not initially intended—profitable. The model for success is established, the bar is set, the terms defined by at least three corporations: YouTube, Google and Vevo. In this example creating ownership could change future material in that users who create mash-ups now know there is a potential for profit, if they meet the right criteria. Ownership is then defined as a reward for the material’s high production value and mass public appeal, and the reverse is lack of ownership for material that lacks both.
Works Cited
Kennedy, Randy. “The Free-Appropriation Writer.” New York Times 26 Feb. 2010: n.pag. Web.
20 Mar. 2010.
Macmillan, Fiona. “Is copyright blind to the visual?”. Visual Communication, Feb 2008; vol. 7:
pp. 97-118.
Renzetti, Elizabeth. The Globe and Mail (Canada), 2010, WEEKEND REVIEW COLUMN;
PLAGIARISM OR MASH - UP?, R3.
Rosoff, Matt. "Vevo CEO confirms it's all about business." CNET. 10 December 2009. Web. 21
Mar. 2010.
ROTH v. UNITED STATES, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
Single Ladies. October 02, 2009. YouTube. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.
Understanding Media Studies: Rushkoff Lecture. 2009. The New School. Video. Web. 14 Mar.
2010.
