Contents
Fair Use
Reproducibility is a principal trait of digital media. Unlike paintings, records, books, videotapes, or even photographs, an exact replica of digital media can be made from the original file. This is true for digital photographs, Compact Discs (and MP3s), DVDs, and websites. From sampling to mashups, collage to subvertisements, contemporary artists and content creators use digital files as source material for the derivation of new works. These works are considered new and original, but they are sometimes built with bits and parts of copyrighted works. In the digital age, new works are often created when more than one existing work is recombined in a new way, providing new visual relationships and new ideas.
Fair Use is not piracy! Fair use is legitimate and legal use of copyrighted media, as protected by copyright law. Fair use is free speech. Fair use is not file sharing.
Copyright content can be used in a new work as long as permission is obtained from the copyright holder, or if the media use falls into the category of fair use. Under the fair use clause of copyright law, limited copyrighted material can be used for a “transformative” purpose, such as commenting upon, criticizing, or parodying the initial material. The 4 key factors are
- the purpose of the derivative work
- the nature of the original work: was the original mostly factual or creative
- the amount of original work used
- the effect that the new work has on the potential or actual market value of the original
Weighing these four factors in a copyright case is not an easy task, which is why judges have been asked to do so. However, successful commercial media that takes advantage of the fair use clause include Saturday Night Live skits, The Simpsons cartoons, and Weird Al Yankovic songs.
For more information about fair use, visit the Stanford Fair Use and Copyright site or The Center for Social Media’s paper Recut, Reframe, Recycle
Appropriation
Appropriation is a word that is used by media artists to describe the visual or rhetorical action of taking over the meaning of something that is already known, by way of visual reference. For example, Andy Warhol appropriated the Campbell’s soup can visual identity to make large, iconic silkscreen prints of the face of Campbell’s soup cans. Warhol’s soup cans are a modified version of “the real thing.” The visual reference to the original soup can is important, as the viewer needs this information in order to understand the idea that the reference conveys (your personal translation of this could be something as simple as a popular American icon to a feeling associated with comfort food). By transforming not only the size and limited graphic palette for portraying the soup cans but also the place where the viewer will encounter them (an art gallery as opposed to the grocery market), Warhol appropriates the original Campbell’s soup cans to create American art that relates to popular culture in its iconic form. Appropriation falls into the category of fair use.
Marcel Duchamp was the first artist to appropriate a common object in his art. This challenged the art community in its definition of what is or is not labeled, “art”. His ready-made sculpture was a urinal transformed into a sculpture because Duchamp signed his pseudonym, R. Mutt on the urinal and submitted it to an art exhibit. Duchamp believed that when an artist declared an object a work of art, the object truly becomes art. In this act of appropriation, the everyday object becomes something other than what it once was. In the case of the urinal, the transformation included the addition of the signature to the porcelain, the change of location (from a bathroom to a gallery), and the change in purpose (whereas before the urinal entered Duchamp’s hands this may have been untrue, after 1917 no one has used the urinal that R. Mutt has signed for the purpose of waste containment).