Different Names for the Same Thing

I don’t know about you, but I find the winter months to be rough. With daylight savings time come and gone, the reality of the season has truly set in. The sun barely shows its face for more than a few hours before we’re back into darkness before dinnertime. Some people cope with this through medication, blue lights or forcing themselves into winter sports. I’m trying to soothe away the SAD with music.

This week, the artist I’ve had on repeat is Death Cab for Cutie. I know – not exactly the epitome of cheer and sunshine, but it works for me. While browsing the reading assignments for this week’s class on copyright, I happened to have their track Different Names for the Same Thing playing in the background. As I took a break to brew some tea, I found myself humming along to that refrain. It dawned on me, in that moment, that I was singing a simplified description of the same material I was reading.

In her book, The People’s Platform, Astra Taylor spends an entire chapter talking about copyright, creation, remix culture, distribution and piracy. While making a lot of very important points, one that I found quite interesting was her explanation of the “free culture activists.” This party is against copyright laws and believe in the free sharing of all media content. Curiously, Taylor points out that the very companies who oppose this mindset also ask their audience to embody that exact same attitude. She writes that “tech companies encourage their users to imagine themselves as remixers and DJs, curators and mash-up artists…even as the same tech companies ferociously cling to their own intellectual property and jealously guard their trade secrets, snapping up patents at breakneck speed.”

Taylor goes on to make a potent observation: each side of the copyright argument, at one point or another, seems to mimic the attitudes of the other. Remixers, posed as opponents of copyright and corporate distribution companies, make their name on the curation of others’ work. They’re not makingtheir own original work, but instead benefitting from the work of others and what they choose to do with it. Can’t the same be said of content distributers like music labels and production companies? It’s not creation, but curation. Whether they’re fighting for the right to remix media content or suing for copyright infringement, they’re still trying to protect their right to benefit from someone else’s work. It’s different names for the same thing.

None of this makes it any easier to figure out the right answer to copyright issues. If anything, realizing the similarities between each side of the argument makes it appear less like a black and white issue. I do believe remixers should be allowed to remix, and I don’t think it’s a crime to want to profit from your creative work. However, should we be spending our time and resources protecting the right to remix existing work, or should we instead be encouraging new original work to be created? Is one art form more valuable than the other? Should we regulate who is allowed to profit from intellectual property, or for how long they can do so?

It’s complicated. It’s confusing. It’s not an easy issue to agree or legislate on. I’ll let you tell me what your thoughts are in the comments below. I’m going to go listen to that DCFC track again, for which only one version and exactly zero remixes exist. Sometimes I need a little simplicity.