STEFAN STEFANOV
Remix to Recycle: An “Environmentalist” Approach to Reusing WorksGLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 26-35

REMIX TO RECYCLE: AN “ENVIRONMENTALIST” APPROACH TO
REUSING WORKS
Stefan Stefanov

Abstract
The technological advancement in the realm of communications and cultural
exchange, along with the facilitation of artistic creativity and publication, which itaffords, has contributed to a major shift in our understanding of the governing
principles of culture. While largely obliterating the distinctions between high andlow culture, and between producer and consumer of culture, the shift in question
has demolished the publication hierarchy of previous centuries by exposing theconcepts of “genius author,” “originality,” and “uniqueness” as unsustainable.
Alternatively, it has ushered in the “remix author,” endeavoring to validate thereuse of existing works as an equal creative principle. Still, an artist or participant
in the cultural exchange, who ventures into this new realm of creativity, faces afundamental problem – the copyright framework that has, in more recent times,
become little more than a money-making machine, which interferes inadequately
with furthering knowledge and creative expression. This has resulted in a culturalenvironment which can be seen as “polluted” by regulations. By analogy withindustrial practices, the remedial course this paper stipulates is one of endorsing“recycling” as a practical solution, which removes the obstacles that corporate
interests have placed on the way of the new remix creativity. This approach of
creative reuse of existing works is proposed as being both “environmentallyfriendly” and a long-due acknowledgement of the nature of creativity. It shows thatcreativity has been previously veiled and thus hindered by a notion of “originality,”
first introduced with the eighteenth-century’s romantic concept of authorship andthen enshrined in an extensive copyright legislation. The inhibitory effects of thestatus quo of regulations and the indicated path toward a “healing” change areindicated by examples.

Introduction
A notable portion of new productions in cinematography, released in the past couple of decades,
are reworkings of familiar stories: from interpretations of Shakespeare, to versions of fairy tales,
to different readings of Biblical stories, to subversive adaptations of Ancient Greek myths. A
similar observation can be made about music as well, where many new productions are covers

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Remix to Recycle: An “Environmentalist” Approach to Reusing Worksor remixes of earlier works. While audiences and critics will generally be divided in theiropinions with regard to the “faithfulness-to-the-source” criterion, a no less significant aspect ofsuch reworkings needs to be addressed: the relationship between “recycling” culture, on the
one hand, and its “sustainability,” on the other. In what follows, I propose a peculiar“environmentalist” approach to the issue of reusing narratives, themes, and elements thereof incontemporary artistic productions. This strategy of comparing cultural with industrial
production aims to show that adopting the ecological norms of the latter will foster and ensurea more viable, fair, and emancipatory model of cultural creativity. To show why this isnecessary, I will first offer an overview of what conditioned the present “polluted” state of
popular culture, supported by examples of its detrimental effects on both the consumption anda recycling reinvention of art. I will then discuss a new model of culture that can be properly
called “greener,” as well as a culture of inclusion and participation, which can legitimately
replace the one that is currently dominant but can be shown to be a culture of exclusion,
exclusiveness, and overregulation. Finally, I will discuss two recent legal developments thatcan be seen both as milestones and as a promise for the eventual embrace of the creative reuseof works as a legitimate, natural, and sustainable mode of artistic expression, which has been
also immensely facilitated and made immediately possible by the fast-developing technologyof the twenty-first century.
Reuse vs. Originality
From the vantagepoint of a contemporary ecological thinking, recycling is integral toenvironmental protection: along with waste recovery, it helps reduce the negative impact that
economy and industry have on nature. Today, the reuse of discarded products and materials
toward a more sustainable development of human civilization is mandated by laws andregulations; the failure to salvage or reutilize such products and materials is condemned andpenalized. But in the realm of culture in general and in artistic production in particular, thesituation is very much the opposite – it is the reuse of (material from) existing works that isbeing vilified and punished by the law, unless of course the right to such reuse is purchased. In
my view, this leads to the gradual exhaustion (through restricted access) of creative resources
and provides for an unsustainable model of popular culture. The latter may appear to be thriving
because of large profits but is unfeasible in the long run because the copyright legislation that
regulates it serves much less for furthering creativity than for enriching those “possessing” thecultural products. The copyright industry is geared predominantly toward the consumption ofculture and, while seemingly not inhibiting recreative artistic endeavor, it discourages many
aspiring artists, especially little known and new on the horizon, by levying fees for the lawful
reuse of material from existing works that are well beyond their means.
This state of affairs is conditioned by the present-day consumerist society, where
cultural artefacts and works of art are largely objectified as commodities and are frequently indemand not only for their aesthetic but also for their exchange value. The exchange value of art
is principally determined by its uniqueness and originality – the more abundant it is in terms ofavailable copies, the lesser its value. In the cases of mass-production and availability, the firstreleases of a new music record or the first screenings of a new film, for example, tend to sell
for more than their subsequent issues or showings. The same applies to rare print publications,

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copies, tapes, and so on – the more unique they are, the higher their price. Thus, it is not somuch the direct gratification value of a work of art (the beauty of the painting, music piece,text), as its exceptionality that determines its economic worth, although arguably thepsychological link between the singularity of an object (an artwork) and the pleasure derived
from it plays its part as well.
This is owed to a model of perceiving creativity and authorship as extraordinary
activities requiring unique talent and skills traditionally associated with the idea of artistic
genius, nowadays firmly rooted in the definition of the term “artist.” Conceived in theeighteenth century, this model is built around the shift in meaning of the concepts of “art” and“artist”, which prior to that commonly meant “skill” and “skilled person,” respectively, todismiss the sense of acquired or taught aptitude and defy the requirements of the compoundmodel of writing with regard to form and suitable theme, 1 in favor of an intrinsic quality
possessed by the genius author. The meaning of “genius” also changed from “characteristic
disposition” to “exalted special ability” 2 – one who could “[act] creatively under laws of its
own origination.” 3 This model, often referred to as “the genius author,” is the result of theprofessionalization of writing and the commodification of art as elements of the industrializedsociety,4 to which the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
is often seen as a reaction. Romanticism was the response of certain poets and thinkers who
refused to accept that the quality of art is to be assessed in terms of popular taste. Instead, they
saw art as a “superior reality” whose merit could not be properly esteemed, in the words of Sir
Egerton Brydges, “by the multitude of readers that an author can attract,” for “[w]ill theuncultivated mind admire what delights the cultivated?”5
Two general categories of art were conceived in the eighteenth century, which drew adivision line between works based on the “originality” criterion: “organic” versus“manufactured” works, where the former “grow” spontaneously, and the latter “are made”
under the dictation of learning. 6 Consequently, a clear pattern of denunciation of the previous
model of writing-as-craftsmanship was installed with the help of both lawyers and poets (theearliest lawsuit on ownership of work and originality being the 1741 Alexander Pope vs.
publisher Edmund Curll), and eventually came to serve as the benchmark for quality poetry andart in general, as opposed to the reuse of pre-existing themes or materials as a second-rate work.
This model developed and became firmly established during the nineteenth century,then came to dominance and continued to prevail (outside of academic circles) during theMartha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, Special
Issue: The Printed Word in the Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1984), p. 427.
2
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York: Anchor Books, 1960), p. 47.
3
Samuel T. Coleridge, Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Poets and Dramatists (London:
J.M.Dent & Son; New York: E.P.Dutton & Co, 1907), p. 46; Archive.org,
https://archive.org/stream/coleridgesessays00cole#page/n7/mode/2up.
4
Martha Woodmansee discusses this at length in “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,” Cardozo Arts
& Enttertainment Law Journal, Vol. 10:279 (1991), pp. 279-292, and “The genius and the copyright: economic
and legal conditions of the emergence of the 'author',” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, Special Issue:
The Printed Word in the Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1984), pp. 425-448.
5
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950, p. 38.
6
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, edited by Edith J. Morley, 1918 (Cornell University
Library, 2009), §43, §105–§115.
1

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Remix to Recycle: An “Environmentalist” Approach to Reusing Workstwentieth century and into the new millennium. In this way, uniqueness and originality became– and still largely are – the prime selling points of art, which in turn became a commodity
having a price tag attached to it. For protection of the “genius” element of art, that which madeit distinctive, copyright legislation was put in place, whose fundamental purpose was toencourage learning and creativity by safeguarding the creator’s interest and effort for a limited
period of time, which was to allow for the artist and/or publisher to make sufficient earnings,
before releasing the protected idea into the public domain for use by others.7 Production anddistribution times significantly shortening as industrialization progressed, and sales turnoverconsiderably expanding over the years, it was not unreasonable to expect that the better a given
artwork sells, the sooner it would be released into the public domain, especially once certain
profit levels were reached.
However, a trend remarkably converse to such expectations was observed as the timespan of copyright protection repeatedly increased over the years – from the initial 14 years 8 tothe current “life of the author” plus 50 or 70 years (where copyright duration is based on theauthor’s death), or 50 or 70 years from publication (where this duration is based on publicationand creation dates). As a result, in today’s rapidly developing world, it is virtually impossible
for an artist to borrow from a copyrighted work, or to use the entire work to produce a newversion of it, without first having to conduct negotiations with and pay substantial fees to its
copyright holders, who these days are rarely individuals but most commonly corporate entities.
Nowadays, copyright protection – and, more importantly, prosecution for infringement –extends to areas one can find it hard to conceive reasonable. An apt example is the case, one ofmany, described by Lawrence Lessig, in which a mother made a 29-second home video of her
toddler son dancing in their living room to the “barely discernible” beat of a song by Prince“playing on a radio somewhere in the background.” 9 Soon after uploading the video toYouTube for her parents to see, Universal Music Group representatives ordered removal of thevideo and then threatened the mother with a $150,000 fine for violating their copyright property
in Prince’s song (the ensuing in legal battle lasted from 2007 until 2017 and ended in asettlement).10 In a similar vein, a two-decade-long legal saga came to an end in 2019 when the
British band The Verve were given back the rights to their second-biggest hit “Bittersweet
Symphony” in a generous gesture by the Rolling Stones, who had been collecting all therevenues made from selling the song since 1997. For their part, The Verve had been foundguilty of sampling a portion from the orchestral cover of the 1965 Rolling Stones’ song “TheLast Time” by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra (not even the actual song but a cover version ofit) that was longer than the five-note sample, whose rights they had duly secured in exchange
for 50% of the revenue “Bittersweet Symphony” would bring. Over this, The Verve lost 100%of the song’s earnings for a period of twenty-two years, until Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
transferred the rights back to the band in what The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft called “a fantastic”

7

Statute of Anne, April 10, 1710, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/anne_1710.asp.
Ibid.
9
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: The Penguin
Press, 2008), p. 1.
10
Ibid., pp. 1–4.
8

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Remix to Recycle: An “Environmentalist” Approach to Reusing Worksand “life-affirming development.”11 Ironically, “The Last Time” had been copied “from a 1955
gospel track by the Staple Singers, called ‘This May Be the Last Time’, which itself was basedon some traditional gospel songs”12 – but the Rolling Stones never paid any royalties for it as
the copyright law was different in 1965. Another example of artwork reuse raising eyebrows is
attested by Andy Warhol’s demand that Terry Gilliam pay him (which he did to avoid a lawsuit) for showing briefly in the background of a scene from 12 Monkeys one of Warhol’s
xeroxed copies of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. I will mention just one more instance among
numerous others, which is quite striking and all the same indicative: Walt Disney’s irreciprocal
gratis reuse of characters and plots from fairytales from the public domain, as well as from theworks of authors such as J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan) or Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book).
Listing no less than thirty-two stories that have been freely sampled by Disney and thus
contributed to the creation of his both artistic works and media empire, a publication by the On
the Commons website ends up with an unambiguous and very indicative statement:
Stories that the Disney Corporation has In Turn Contributed to the Public Domain (Which Are
Not Legally Available for Anyone Else to Build Upon Because Copyright Limits Keep Being
Extended to Keep Mickey Mouse locked up in Disney’s Castle):
NONE!13

The DJ and Remix Culture
Reuse of pre-existing material to create a new work has gradually become a fundamental
principle of creativity since the time of the first photomontages, and since the deejays andselectors of Jamaica discovered that they could vary the existing music recordings bymanipulating the turntable and equalizers, as well as by overlaying it with vocalizations of beats
and chanting. Later on, as the budding craft of turntablism was exported to New York in theearly 1970s, a Jamaican-American teenager discovered that he could isolate and quickly repeat
short beat sections from jazz/funk records, thus inventing the popular hip-hop style.14 As Van
Dorston notes, by employing affordable equipment, the emerging figure of the hip-hop DJ“could selectively take any sound and leave behind the posing rock star hero attitudes provided
by corporate rock, toss aside the leads [and] re-edit other people’s texts and call them theirown.” 15 This constituted an emancipatory act, an act of enabling social groups previously
excluded from the music-making elite to produce music.16 In less than 20 years, the practice ofMark Savage, “The Bitter Sweet Symphony dispute is over” (BBC.com, May 23, 2019),
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48380600.
12
Mike Masnick, “A True Story of 'Copyright Piracy': Why the Verve Will Only Start Getting Royalties Now for
Bittersweet Symphony” (TechDirt.com, May 25, 2019),
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190525/00140242276/true-story-copyright-piracy-why-verve-will-onlystart-getting-royalties-now-bittersweet-symphony.shtml.
13
On the Commons team, “How Disney Raids the Public Domain and gives nothing back in return because Mickey
Mouse is locked up under copyright in the castle” (On the Commons, 2013),
https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/how-disney-raids-public-domain.
14
Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved my Life (New York: Grover Press, 2000), p. 226.
15
A. S. Van Dorston, “Postmodernist Music: The Culture of “Cool” Vs. Commodity: Shop as Usual… and Avoid
Panic Buying” (Fast and Bulbous, 1990), http://fastnbulbous.com/postmodernist-music-the-culture-of-cool-vscommodity-shop-as-usual-and-avoid-panic-buying/.
16
Ibid.
11

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Remix to Recycle: An “Environmentalist” Approach to Reusing Worksappropriating from existing music recordings completely subverted the traditional notions ofmusic making and of the “form” of music in general, serving, among other things, as basis for
two of the world’s currently most popular music styles: hip-hop/rap and electronic music (withthe host of all sub-genres they include).
In this way, the DJ, working in a club, constructing musical progressions (also known
as “sets”) from pre-recorded compositions, or using sophisticated digital/computer equipment
to sample fragments of pre-existing music to re-mix with newly generated sounds, became
established as performer and composer. As Brewster and Broughton write in their detailed studyof the rise of DJ culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,a DJ is an improvisational musician. It just happens that in place of notes he has songs, in place of
piano keys or guitar strings he has records. And just like a musician, the DJ’s skill lies in how
these are chosen and put together. Think of a DJing performance in a compressed time-frame andit might help. Where a guitarist can impress an audience by playing a 30-second improvised
sequence of chords and notes, what a DJ does takes a lot longer – a DJ needs to be judged on a
two or three-hour narrative of records. And there are now so many records available, and so manymixes of most songs, that a DJ’s records are fully analogous to the notes of an instrument. […]The DJ is a musical editor, a metamusician, he makes music out of other music.17

Remix and its underlying principles of appropriation and recontextualisation – cut/copy &paste, to use the popular computer terminology – are today widely employed beyond the domainof music, with the most obvious manifestation in digital text being blogging and in video/film
being mashups. The principles of remixing are less conspicuously manifested in a large shareof works but in the beginning of the twenty-first century, a very significant part of new works
in all spheres of art are remakes, revisits, reproductions of familiar narratives, plots, and themes.
Such art products have amounted to a culture that is largely fashioned around building upon theworks of others, the reuse rather than the production of new, “original,” “unique” material,
which was the main characteristic of nineteenth-twentieth century artistic creativity. This kindof culture has been dubbed Remix culture: “a society that allows and encourages derivative
works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new product.” 18
Lessig, to whom we attribute the coinage of the Remix culture concept, envisages as
desirable such a society which will no longer restrict and prohibit but will foster creative efforts
at remixing by integrating, modifying, and expanding on works with copyright holders. To thisend, in 2001, he founded the Creative Commons, a non-profit organization whose main function
is to develop, support, and steward legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digitalcreativity, sharing, and innovation 19 – a service offered entirely for free to users. And yet, inorder for the ideas and principles informing the Remix culture to become a mainstream
philosophy of creativity in the Western and West-influenced societies, a more substantial shift
in the paradigm of thinking about art is necessary. We need to stop thinking of works that are

17

Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved my Life, pp. 19–20.
Kirby Ferguson, “Everything is a Remix” (Everything is a Remix, 2011, 2015),
http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/.
19
Creative Commons, “Our Mission,” http://oer2go.org/mods/enboundless/creativecommons.org/about/mission-and-vision/index.html.
18

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created using pre-existing material – be they themes, plots, ideas, images, scenes, or melodies– as inferior; and equally, we need to remove the legal obstacles that still stand on their way.
Such a change will be possible in the conditions of a complete overhaul of ourunderstanding of the supporting media of the arts, which before the advent of the era of digital
storage and transfer were strictly dependent on materials that are, by nature, unalterable: canvas,
paper, tape, stone, or metal. Unlike the pre-digital artworks, which formed the backbone of aread-only culture, “works are [now] created in a continuous flow, without aspiring to become
immutable objects, always subject to the possibility of being modified.” 20 Such works enable aread/write culture21 and make it possible for the users to create art as easily as they consume it.
In the first decades of the new millennium, we already have a plethora of materiallybound works, as more novels, stories, poems, songs, melodies, photographs, videos, and films
were produced in the second half of the twentieth century than in the entire history of arts
before. This excess, occurring in the conditions of an artistic culture tightly regulated bycopyright legislation continuously amended to accommodate corporate interests at the expenseof individual interests, can no longer be perceived one-sidedly, as welfare, but must also beassessed for its impairing effect on creativity. The “environmentalist” approach to the questionof reusing existing materials in the arts promised in the beginning demands from us that we
consider the present situation from the position of people who are inundated with commodified
art, which we can only consume, and if we want to give expression to our inspired creative
impulses, we are required to pay amounts of money that are beyond the means of the vast
majority us. In a manner of speaking, we must ransom out what many believe should be auniversal right but has been curtailed by corporations and institutions governed by pecuniary
interests, unless we want to face and suffer penal actions. Lessig writes that the current
copyright legislation, inadequate as it is to deal with the twenty-first century’s remix creativity,
can only accomplish one thing, namely, to condemn entire new generations as criminals:
In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from
how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when
their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will tothem seem natural?22

Or, as Adolfo Estalella writes,
They are two paradigms of culture that are completely at odds with each other. One simply sees
culture as a commercial object from which it can extract full financial benefits. The other sees it
as a space for open participation, in which users can participate by constantly re-creating works,
thus participating in the remix culture.23
Adolfo Estalella, “From Remix Culture to Collective Creation,” in Creación e Inteligencia Colectiva(Asociación Cultural Comenzemos Empezemos, Instituto Andaluz de la Juventud, Universidad Internacional deAndalucía, Festival zemos98, 2005),
http://www.zemos98.org/festivales/zemos987/pack/pdf/adolfoestalellaeng.pdf.
21
The terms read-only (RO) culture and read/write (RW) culture were coined by Lawrence Lessig in analogy tocomputer file properties and modification rights. (Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy, p. 28).
22
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, p. xviii.
23
Adolfo Estalella, “From Remix Culture to Collective Creation,” p. 189.
20

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Prior to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, it was precisely thecontinuous reuse of plots and the reshaping of narratives that drove culture’s recreation andevolution. The spread of the printing culture from the fifteenth century onwards, a period which
Thomas Pettitt refers to as the Gutenberg Parenthesis, changed the game all along. Whereas the
pre-parenthetical period was an era of a predominantly oral culture characterized by being “recreative, collective, con-textual, unstable, traditional,” centered around “performance,” theGutenberg Parenthesis became an epoch of artwork that is “original, individual, autonomous,
stable, canonical.” 24 In order to sustain itself, the culture of printed text, whose center is“composition,” required and established strict regulations governing ownership, privileges, andrights. But they no longer reflect the reality of twenty-first century post-parenthetical culture,
which Pettitt describes as thriving by “sampling, remixing, borrowing, reshaping,appropriating, recontextualizing.” 25 The culture of the twenty-first century increasingly
gravitates around the remix, which largely draws on the creative reuse of already existingartworks. Thus, whereas the Gutenberg Parenthesis was a time of containment, the new epochof Remix culture appears to be a time of conjunction.26
It is extremely important to realize that unless culture in general and the arts in particular
are left unimpeded in their natural flow of recreation – which is possible through recycling what
has been produced and what is available – the tendency of exhaustion, of loss of meaning, andof becoming increasingly superficial of not only the objects of art but also of our entire sociocultural and individual existence will only aggravate further. We ought to see culture as anenvironment which has been polluted by the numerous unrecyclable artefacts piled in heaps, anenvironment which desperately needs recycling to be able to flourish. In this regard, in thesubtitle of his book Free Culture, Lessig makes an unambiguous statement on the culprit of thecurrent situation: the “big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control
creativity.”27
I see a promising sign of healing from the “containment” of the Gutenberg Parenthesisin an announcement from June 2014 that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciencesof the United States (NARAS), the organization behind the Grammy Awards, amended its rules
and regulations to permit musical compositions featuring samples and interpolations of preexisting songs to participate in all Grammy Award song writing categories, including Song of
the Year. Such musical compositions were previously allowed only in the Best Rap Song
category. Commenting on the NARAS decision, contributing writer for a number of music andculture magazines Andrew Parks writes for Wondering Sound that while “this probably won’t
erase their reputation of being woefully behind the times”, it stands for a ground-breaking

Thomas Pettitt, “Before the Gutenberg Parenthesis: Elizabethan-American Compatibilities,” in Media in
Transition 5: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, Plenary 1: “Folk Cultures and Digital
Cultures” (MIT, 2007), http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/legacy/mit5/papers/pettitt_plenary_gutenberg.pdf
25
Ibid.
26
Thomas Pettitt, “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies” (MIT, 2010),
https://commforum.mit.edu/the-gutenberg-parenthesis-oral-tradition-and-digital-technologies-29e1a4fde271.
27
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How the Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock down Culture andControl Creativity (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).
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recognition of “an influential, valid form of expression that’s been around since the “80s.” 28This signals the reinstating of the remix to its proper position, of which Lessig writes,
We begin with some creative work, work which some author produced by mixing bits of culture
and his own creativity together. That work is then remixed by others, through the addition of othercreative work, or even through simple criticism of that work. This is remix. And in this sense, life
is remix. In this sense, culture is remix. Knowledge is remix. Politics is remix. Remix is how wecreate. Remix is how we recreate. Remix is how we are human, and how we as humans makeculture.29

Another recent development which is worth mentioning furthers the recognition of theremix and its principles as art proper in the strictly formal and mandatory definitions of thelegal domain. The Federal Supreme Finance Court (FSFC) of Germany ruled in the end of
October 2020 that turntables, CD players, and mixing consoles can be treated as musicalinstruments and, likewise, DJs as musicians:
The DJs not only play sound carriers from other sources, but also perform their own new pieces ofmusic by using instruments in the broader sense to create sequences of sounds with their own
character.30

The ruling was made in light of the current economic crisis impacting German business (andthe world) as a consequence of country-wide lockdowns to prevent the spread of the COVID19 virus, along with the legislation and regulations adopted to help businesses, including the
clubbing and nightlife business, survive. Recognizing that works created by reusing material
from pre-existing works should be treated on par with “original” works (regardless of how
problematic the concept of originality may be) and that DJs and remixers are artists is a clear
indication of the direction in which popular culture is going: abandoning the “genius” author
fallacy and restoring Remix as the way “we as humans make culture.”31
Conclusion
Remix culture is an undeniable fact that has been enabled by readily available, affordable, anduser-friendly digital technology. Texts, songs, videos, and films are being produced now, somethirty years after the personal computer became ubiquitous, at an unprecedented speed and inpreviously inconceivable volumes. The automatic protection of copyrights that has been in
effect for the past forty years, along with the excessively narrow allowance for the free reuseof fragments of existing works, and the unaffordable fees payable for the lawful reuse and theAndrew Parks, “Grammy Board Finally Recognizes Sampling as a Form of Songwriting” (Wondering Sound,2014),
http://www.wonderingsound.com/news/grammy-board-finally-recognizes-sampling-form-songwriting/(archived copy available at: https://archive.vn/2fKbu).
29
Lawrence Lessig, “(Re)creativity: How Creativity Lives,” in Porsdam, Helle (ed.), Copyright and Other Fairy
Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar
Publishing Limited, 2006), p. 16.
30
Damion Pell, “Germany has just declared that techno is music and the DJ is a musician” (Decoded Magazine,
October 30, 2020), https://www.decodedmagazine.com/germany-has-just-declared-that-techno-is-music-and-thedj-is-a-musician/.
31
Lawrence Lessig, “(Re)creativity: How Creativity Lives,” p. 16.
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legal services required for arranging it, have had an inhibitive effect on culture’s natural courseof progression. The legal framework controlling the access to and the reuse of works is the
product of the idea that the author draws inspiration solely from what enables them to claim
exclusive ownership of their creative output – all conceived and developed in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. While the “genius author” concept has been proven untenable inacademic circles, its reign in popular culture remains largely undisputed. This has provided fora disparaging attitude toward “unoriginal” artists who sample, borrow, and reuse existingartworks. It has also enabled an array of preposterous demands for compensation for borrowing
from works that would have been quickly dismissed had the current copyright law not been as
exacting. In my view, it is an unambiguous ramification of this state of affairs that our culturalenvironment is a dangerously polluted and urgently needs remedial measures if we want to see
our artists and culture as a whole thriving. I see no more feasible a solution than the facilitationand encouragement of recycling of cultural products. This is not a novel idea, as I incidentally
discovered while researching one of the examples given here. In the conclusion to their comicsbased discussion of copyright and “how it’s supposed to work,” Aoki, Boyle, and Jenkins write,
The ecological idea really works. What we need here is sustainable development. We’ve learned
that development must be balanced with environmental protection. In the cultural realm, we needto have a similar balance between what is owned and what is free for everyone to use… a culturalenvironmentalism.32

It can only be regrettable that to this day all that we have is the recognition that songs madeusing samples and interpolations should be treated as equal to any other musical composition,and that DJs are creative musicians and producers, too. It seems the emancipation of creative
work still has a long way to go.

32

Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, Bound by Law? (Duke University Press, 2008), p. 64.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

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Volume III, No. 01/2020