Copyright Criminals – A „Must See“- Documentary
The Movie Copyright Criminals is a beautiful documentary about the whole copyright madness in the sample / remix culture of urban music.
For most sampling it is a natural technique to create from old creatively new or better to say putting it into a new context. This is a double-edged sword: One say it is art, the other say it is just “copy and paste”. For some, it is, however, a lucrative industry whose interests are enforced using the copyright sometimes without regard to losses. Since many questions in this supposedly well-regulated law seem to be obsolete in the present, often wins in doubt, the party with the better lawyers, unfortunately, in the rare event of the creative. This questionable status quo tries Copyright Criminals work up. To better understand the basic problem, the Moviemakers show what you can do with sampling and how deep this culture technique is now ingrained in our everyday lives. One learns that sampling is legally regulated and more or less clear boundaries are defined by copyright. At the same downsides to that situation are presented. It quickly becomes clear that rights are often only of interest if someone can make money with it. In the course of popularization of sample music, a style evolved from a creative standpoint, emerged other professions (lawyers, artists, copyright owners etc) that wants to access a piece of the pie and so the creative process decelerates. Sampling is currently no longer a self-evident form of art, but a legal minefield, whose followers will long relegated to a tolerated gray zone until the prospect of gain strikes with the full curing of the law.
The filmmakers approach to artistic practice, in the hip-hop culture in particular plays a central role in a variety of ways and have interviewed for the documentary experienced musicians, DJs and producers such as Aesop Rock,Saul Williams, George Clinton and many more.
We are in the Year 2014: the copyright laws are lagging the current state of the art. A ood parallel draws the example of the Internet, which is is not even grown up,but growing faster then ever into a Big Data universe. It most recently appeared that Google scans tons of Books, which is not particularly new principle of sampling. In blogs and much faster platforms such as Tumblr, Google Reader or Facebook texts, images and videos are torn out of their original context and almost virally reproduced again and again to a simple mouse click.
The principle of the copy and paste of sampling or the “De-contextualizing” as an artform is an often discussed question. Because these techniques are already in our everyday lives, it offers exciting works of art and stories. But-and this one must also be admit, also a lot of crap.
The discussion of how we now deal with copyright in the 21st Century, should be in full swing. Are there new rules, new certainties and new laws?The issue with the sampling and copyright has never been more complicated than it is today.
One thing is certain, without “stealing” of music there wouldn’t´ be a presence of any music genre such as called hip-hop, which also contributes to a lot to the contemporary understanding of old music for younger generations.
Copyright Criminals, 2009, by Benjamin Franzen
Text: C.Klaue