“Copyright Criminals” Premieres Tuesday, Jan. 19 on PBS
“Copyright Criminals,” a film that examines the conflict between the current law of copyright and the norms of the community of musicians who employ sampling as a creative technique, premieres on PBS’s Independent Lens beginning on Tuesday, January 19, 2010, and will be replayed throughout the week. Check the listings here to see if your local PBS affiliate will be airing it. If not, a DVD of the film will be on sale beginning January 26. Creative Commons sponsored a remix contest to accompany the film on their CCMixter site and you can find the winners here.
I first had the pleasure of seeing “Copyright Criminals” at a screening at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in Washington, DC back in October 2009. In fact, the film’s producers/directors/writers, Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, were gracious enough to answer my question from the audience about the role legal strategy played in the creation of a movie which relies heavily on audio clips of sampled and transformed versions of well-known music (answer: a significant one, as it would have been impossible to pay to license the amount of music they used — the filmmakers consulted lawyers for opinions regarding the bounds of fair use throughout the production process).
While the themes of the film were already familiar to me, it offers a fine basic introduction to an important topic. Three aspects of the film struck me as particularly notable:
- The film’s soundtrack, which was produced by El-P and RJD2 and which juxtaposes a great deal of well-known music in a way that is legitimately educational.
- The fact that the filmmakers take note of the economics behind the production of much of the music that has lent itself heavily to sampling. For instance, they note that Clyde Stubblefield has never received royalties for his performance or creation of the “Funky Drummer” break. They themselves record Stubblefield replaying the break specifically for the film and pay him for his contribution.
- A somewhat incongruous appearance in a film about digital sampling from digi-phobe Steve Albini, who offers the reasonable insight that you don’t have to think much of sampling as a musical technique (he certainly does not) to reject the idea that the only way to deal with unauthorized sampling is to, as he puts it, “get the law involved.”
If you’ve seen the film, feel free to post comments here.
This entry was posted by Richard on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response below, or trackback from your own site.
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January 18th, 2010
@ 9:52 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ambivalent Ricky, 95years. 95years said: New On 95Years: "Copyright Criminals" Premieres Tuesday, Jan. 19 on PBS http://bit.ly/8cZXpp [...]
January 19th, 2010
@ 1:26 pm
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by 95years: New On 95Years: “Copyright Criminals” Premieres Tuesday, Jan. 19 on PBS http://bit.ly/8cZXpp...
April 29th, 2010
@ 4:31 pm
[...] in January, prior to its debut on PBS, I wrote about a new documentary called “Copyright Criminals,” which I had seen at the Future of Music Policy Summit in October 2009. “Copyright [...]
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