Remix Culture & Copyright

FMCS3100 Digital Culture Production Project

[strawberryamanita]

Visit Original Link

tbh i wanted to do this because someone else already tried and i wanted to improve on it

because i’m an asshole

songs i used:

Melanie Martinez: “Dollhouse”

Marina and the Diamonds: “Valley of the Dolls”

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Song Mashup - Remix Culture

[brittsart]

Hermione & Crookshanks! 

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Harry Potter Fanart. Remix Culture - making your own interpretation of media

[deboracabral]

“not Slytherin”

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Harry Potter Fanart. Remix Culture - making your own interpretation of media

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Re Imagination

“Transformative works create and uncover meaning and values by disrupting the barriers between diverse histories, traditions and genres to comment, parody, bolster, undermine and emphasise the cultural values of past, present and future” (Collins, 2015).

“Existing works can find themselves re­presented in ways never expressed, nor perhaps intended or explored by the original authors, such are the cultural lives of intellectual properties” (Coombe, 1998).

Although intellectually remixed works are the progeny of their parent work, the legal understanding of this relationship can be problematic, there hasn’t quite been a way discovered yet to define this relationship as each case is different.

Works based from pre existing books/movies/tv shows/characters are all extensions of the already existing story and are created for the love of it by fans, expanding these worlds with their imagination. 

This type of work narrowly avoids being classed as copyright infringement under “Fair Use”. There is arguments against this by people claiming that it is in fact copyright and stealing the intellectual property of others. Advocates of fanfiction and the like disagree, claiming that they are only using the original works as a starting point and are creating their own works. 

[remixcultureandcopyright]

MASHUPS

Mashups are a part of remix culture. There are many different types of mashups but the first that come immediately to mind are song mashups. DJ Earworm on Youtube posts song mashups, the most popular being the United States of Pop ones posted each year featuring the best songs from that year. These songs feature only a small part of each song, at most 10 seconds I believe. They are a parody and are covered by fair use. 

There are also mashups created from sports reels, showing the highlights of certain teams or players from the season, these are harder to distinguish whether or not it is copyright infringement. 

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Reblogs

Below are a few posts that I reblogged from the Copyright tag.

The first, a drawing titled “It’s Lit” is a drawing based of a photograph taken at a party. After the picture was posted a comment was made that someone should turn it into a piece of art, and someone took that suggestion and ran with it, creating a drawing very similar to the original photograph. They have not credited the original picture, but because it is a drawing with the subjects likeness not exact it should fall under fair use. 

The second, a meme made by someone using screenshots from “The Simpsons” depicts characters being pointed at with a bat and the bat wielder saying “Eeny, Meeny, MIny, Moe” and pointing to the character Moe when he says moe. Someone has just taken screenshots from an episode and reposted them with the caption written on the pictures. The post originally came from the site 9gag where people often post memes. 

The 3rd post uses a screenshot from the show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia of the character Charlie, and has a caption above mentioning the show 13 Reasons Why. This is an example of a meme. The post is describing how someone feels when trying to describe the show 13 Reasons Why

[hamedhazel]

“It’s Lit” by Hamed Hazel

A1 Canvas prints coming 30/5/17

[email protected] for more details

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Copyright Tag

If you search for the tag “Copyright” on tumblr you will be shown page after page of posts tagged copyright. 

These posts range from fanfiction stories, fan art drawings, screenshots from cartoons and television shows, audio posts of songs, memes and many more. 

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is novel based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”.

The novel is a remix of the original story adding in a war against zombies and transforming the Bennet sisters into formidable warriors fighting the zombies and being trained martial arts and weaponry by their father. Elizabeth Bennet is still the protagonist like in the original story, the difference being she is also a martial arts master who stores weapons on her body underneath her dresses so she is always prepared to fight zombies may they appear.

This version of “Pride and Prejudice” was more enjoyable and entertaining to me, there was action and I liked that they were women who didn’t NEED husbands, they could look after themselves. 

The transformation of the characters and deviation from the original storyline place the novel under fair use and deem it not to be copyright infringement. 

A movie was also released in 2016 of the new version. 

[remixcultureandcopyright]

50 Shades of Grey

50 Shades of Grey, originally a Twilight Fanfiction story, became the international best seller selling over 125 million copies worldwide and being translated into 52 languages. 

Originally posted on Fanfiction websites under a pseudonym the author E.L. James based her re imagined story on the characters of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan from the widely popular story Twilight by Stephanie Meyer.

After her story became popular she created her own website and exclusively posted her story there before turning it into a novel series. 

E.L. James was protected by Fair Use because her story had changed the characters and their setting enough to be more of a parody than a copy. 

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Remixes and Copyright

Remixes fall under fair use in the world of copyright and are therefore not classed as infringement. 

“the concept of “fair use,” defined as use “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching..., scholarship, or research”... fair use and fan fiction advocates argue that fan fiction should be understood as eminently transformative and thus protected under fair use.” (Busse, & Farley, 2013)

“Case law circumscribes the limits of fair use, distinguishing works that are merely “derivative” from those that are “transformative” and thus add value” (Chander and Sunder, Fiesler, Katyal, McCardle, Tushnet).

Fanfiction is the perfect example when talking about remixes and copyright infringement. They are case by case examples but overall are considered to not be copyright infringement because they are transformative enough to be safe. Fanficitions are an extension of the love that fans have for books, tv shows, movies and more. One very popular fanfiction site has hundreds of thousands of stories posted in hundreds of languages from people all over the world. The tag line for the site is “unleash your imagination”. 

Harry Potter is one world that has sprouted the most fanfictions on the site, 766,000 stories based upon the world of Harry Potter are currently posted on the site. The world that J.K. Rowling created with her novel series has been expanded 100 fold with the creation of fanfictions, people create their own characters, go further into the personality and story lines of minor characters from her series and create whole stories and lives for these characters so that they can keep living in the magical world of Harry Potter. 

Even though the last Harry Potter novel was released 10 years ago in 2007, and the last movie was released in 2011, there are still people posting and writing Harry Potter inspired fanfictions daily. In fact tumblr is a place where many people post their fanfictions as well as sites created specifically for fanfiction stories.

[remixcultureandcopyright]

Remix Culture

Previously there was Read Only culture. Now with the internet and everything that it can do Remix Culture has come around. People take things that they like and are interested in and add their own fantasies to them. A big part of remix culture is FanFiction. People all around the world take the books, movies, television shows etc and write their own versions of them, making everything turn out how they wished, or just adding on more to the story from where the original author left off. Could this be considered copyright? And should the original creators of these medias fight for copyright laws so that their works can’t be reimagined by fans and rewritten?