KEY POINTS:
In the world according to Lawrence Lessig the remix and the mashup are not just okay, they're vital. They're also under worldwide threat by increasingly draconian copyright law including our own insane Clause 92a of the Copyright Act due to come into effect on February 28. Not to mention 92c which is already law.
Mashup and remix is when people take digital files containing text, graphics, audio, video, or animation, or all of the above and recombine and modify them to create something derivative, but nonetheless new. Lessig, Stanford Law School professor and guru of arguments about copy rights and wrongs, sees remix as the new writing of the digital age.
As he told an audience at Auckland University this week, if you're under 20 and don't know how to shoot a video, add a soundtrack and upload it to You Tube, there's something wrong with you.
Which is why he's not impressed by the legal action taken against the Act Party's mashup of the Greens' "Vote for me" advertisement which features a young girl standing in front of Rangitoto.
The Act ad used the Green Party image, but with a different voice-over saying: "If you really want to vote for me you'd give me opportunities not regulations, choices not controls, you wouldn't tell me what light bulbs to use, or showers or how many children I could have because if you do I probably will go overseas and all there will be is empty space."
But it was short-lived - its placeholder on the Act website and You Tube now carrying the words: "Video temporarily removed due to pending legal challenge."
In Lessig's analysis, there's nothing wrong with an Act Party mashup trying to subvert the Greens' powerful message. "That's exactly what argument and political debate is about. It's about trying to show how what someone says is not the only way you ought to think about it."
In his view, copyright should have nothing to say about the remix. Allowing it to do so is to allow the law to be misused with a chilling effect on freedom of expression. The Greens are not impressed.
"Imitation is the highest form of flattery and this would be just funny - if it weren't for the fact that a young child's image has been used and manipulated without permission and the property rights of small New Zealand businesses have been stolen," says co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons.
Remember, Act is the party that views property rights as sacrosanct. But putting aside Act's hypocrisy, and moral and privacy concerns about using children in advertising, the real problem with Act's mashup is that it wasn't very good. Or rather, it was lazy and poorly executed - filching the photographic image directly and not modifying it sufficiently.
To see how it ought to be done, Act might want to look at the work of Girl Talk, the stage name of musician Gregg Gillis who specialises in mashup style remixes, often using 10 or more unauthorised samples from different songs to create a new song. Even so, the New York Times Magazine has called his music "a lawsuit waiting to happen".
The difference, according to Lessig, is attribution - "the core of respect in the remix". More and more musicians like Girl Talk are beginning to include notes on their albums citing the people they've remixed.
In such cases where commercial gain is involved, Lessig says he's not opposed to some form of simple compensation for the remix component - in much the same way as musicians pay for the right to make a cover of another musician's song.
Lessig is not a copyright abolitionist. He enjoys Hollywood blockbusters and can't imagine a world where they can't be made because no one can be compensated because copyright no longer exists.
But he does argue for a radical rethink and rebalancing of copyright law - pointing out our current efforts to prohibit downloading simply don't work and have the "corrosive" effect of branding our children pirates and criminals.
But it doesn't stop there. Clauses 92a and c of our Copyright Act will soon see users banned from the internet, and remixes and mashups taken down from websites simply because someone pronounces (no proof required) copyright has been breached. This is copyright gone mad - overriding due process, stultifying free speech and strangling creative expression - the opposite of what it was intended for. That is, giving people independent means to be a creator.
