Today morning, I was called to my Alma Mater, Jindal Global Law School, (of course virtually) to talk about Music Sampling and its relation to Copyright. Prof. Vishwas H. Deviah (who was my Independent Research Project advisor at Jindal, as also for whom, I served as a Teaching Assistant during my final year) had invited me to address a lecture to the LLM and Undergraduate students who have taken up the elective -“Music and Copyrights”.
Although the method of pedagogy in terms of this course is supposed to primarily be formalistic, and case-law oriented, tracing the judicial interpretations of sampling, I decided that given this opportunity, and having recently read The Color of Creatorship by Prof. Anjali Vats, I would try and do something different, and focus more on an interdisciplinary approach towards this lecture.
Here is the drive link with the slides that I used for the lecture/presentation:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gBvpnX4XeHbhv31QnA5NLnlmm6vK3tvl?usp=sharing
ALTERNATIVELY:
Broadly, I have tried to provoke a critical voice, against the normative idea which is taught in copyright lectures, especially here in India. I have tried and focussed on viewing and tracing the imperialistic nature of Copyright, and its adverse impact on normative non-white practices like sampling- by doing a historical overview of copyright policy, as well as of Hip-Hop as a form of music. I tried, through, this lecture to make a case for Copyright’s racist origins hidden, and invisible in the face of the law, until one gets into technicalities.
I have tried to break bubbles around the acceptability of copyright’s idea of windfall incentives. Also to show how knowledge development has been a result of widespread appropriation, which is now widely condemned, by the same erstwhile appropriating communities. I also tried to break the shackles of the ideas of Romantic Authorship, by normalising conceptions of “creative borrowing” as a core and intrinsic practice within music and art.
This is not really something which is ever taught in our copyright courses. The idea of writing this post is that we must try and include conflicting narratives and dissents to status quo policies like copyrights, to realise the societies and communities- it adversely affects, and to focus upon their lenses, who have been at the receiving end of these colonial impositions, which they sometimes do not even realise they have been subjected to.
As copyright scholars, it is our role to emphasise on this perspective as well, rather than merely focussing on internalising copyright policy, and focussing on intrinsic reforms within it.
Reading List/ Sources I referred to (even copied from) for the purpose of these slides:
- The Color Of Creatorship, Anjali Vats (Stanford University Press)
- Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidyanathan (NYU Press)
- Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright (Chapters- 3,4,6), by Mark Rose, Oren Bracha and Maurizio Borghi (Open Book Publishers)
- Locke’s 1694 Memorandum (And More incomplete Copyright histographies), Justin Hughes (Cardozo AELJ)
- Primary Sources on Copyright, http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/
- Digital Sampling and Cultural Inequality, David Hesmonhalgh (The Open University UK)
- Sampling, Looping and Mashin…Oh My: Hip Hop music is scatching more than the surface of Copyright, Tonya M. Evans
- Copyright, Communication and Culture, Towards a Relational Theory of Copyright law, Carys Craig (Osgoode Digital Commons)
- Copyright, Culture & (and) Black Music: A legacy of Unequal Protection, K.J.Greene (Hastings CELJ)
- Copyright, Translations and relations between the British and India in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century, Lionel Bently (Chicago-Kent law review)
- Cultural Environmentalism and Beyond, James Boyle
- Intellectual Property and the intersection of Race and Gender, Lady Sings the Blues, K.J. Greene (Journal of Gender, Social Policy and Law)
- Critical Race Theory, Signifyin’, and Cultural Ownership, Richard L. Schur (in Parodies of Ownership
- On the Author Effect, Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity, Peter Jaszi
- Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
- Creativity and Culture in Copyright theory, Julie Cohen
- Digital Sampling: A Cultural Perspective, Henry Self
- From Mozart to Hip Hop: The Impact of Bridgeport v. Dimension Films on Musical Creativity, Lauren Brandes, (UCLA Entertainment Law Rev)
- Social Justice and Copyrights Excess, Betsy Rosenblatt (Texas AnM Journal of IP Law)
- Everyone is a superhero: The Cultural Theory of Mary Sue- Fan Fiction as Fair Use, Madhavi Sundar and Anupam Chander (California Law Review)
- Why Copyright law needs music lessons, Carys Craig (Osgoode Hall Law School)
- Fair Use and the Future of Art, Amy Alder (NYU School of Law)
- Hungry Translations: Relearning the world through Radical Vulnerability, Richa Nagar
- Free to be You and Me? Copyright and Constraint, Rebecca Tusnet, Harvard Law Review Forum
- Who Watches the Plagiarism Police, Brian Frye and Akshat Agrawal, (The Contemporary Law Forum)
- Is a Plot/Theme Copyrightable, Lets end the Controversy and Conflict, Part 2, Akshat Agrawal (IPRMENTLAW)
PHIL IP AND POLICY 