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NEGATIVLAND'S TENETS
OF FREE APPROPRIATION:
FREE APPROPRIATION IS INEVITABLE
when a population bombarded with electronic
media meets the hardware that encourages
them to capture it.
AS ARTISTS, our work involves displacing
and displaying bites of publicly available,
publicly influential material because it
peppers our personal environment and
affects our consciousness. In our society, the
media which surrounds us is as available,
and as valid a subject for art, as nature itself.
AS ARTISTS, the economic prohibition of
clearance fees and the operational
prohibition of not being able to obtain
permission when our new context is
unflattering to our samples should not
diminish our ability to reference and reflect
the media world around us.
OUR APPROPRIATIONS are multiple,
transformative, and fragmentary in nature;
they do not include whole works.
OUR WORK is an authentic and original
»whole« being as much more than the sum of
it's samples. This is not a form of
»bootlegging«, »piracy« or »counterfeiting«
intending to profit from the commercial
potential of the subjects appropriated. The
law must come to terms with distinguishing
the difference between economic intent and
artistic intent.
THERE IS NO DEMONSTRABLE
NEGATIVE effect on the market value of the
original works from which we appropriate. or
the cultural status or incomes of the artists
who made the original works. Referencing a
work in a fragmentary way is at least as
likely to have a positive effect on these areas
of concern. (RAP/HIP HOP sampling played
a big part in the renewal of James Brown's
career, and he has sued them for it!)
THE URGE TO MAKE one thing out of other
things is an entirely traditional, socially
healthy, and artistically valid impulse which
has only recently been criminalized in order
to force private tolls on the practice (or
prohibit it to escape embarrassment). These
now all-encompassing private locks on mass
media have led to a mass culture that is
almost completely »professional«, formalized
and practically immune to any form of
bottom-up, direct-reference criticism it
doesn't approve of.
THE COURTS' often-espoused principle that
»if it's done for profit, it can't be fair use«,
represents a thoughtless and carelessly
misguided prejudice against the struggle of
new art to survive. Making media- any
media- is expensive. It requires substantial
up front investments in time and
manufactured goods to create, duplicate,
and distribute anything. The courts' easy
reliance on a not-for-profit standard for fair
use ignores the reality that artists, no matter
what they choose to do, need to support
themselves and their work with a return on
their investment just like everyone else. The
currently applied 'nonprofit' standard simple
assures that only the independently wealthy
may dabble in fair use. If society values the
challenging and reforming aspects of critical,
fair use works that bubble up from
independent grassroots thinking, the law
should not condone the smothering of such
works by disallowing their economic survival
in our free marketplace.
WE BELIEVE that artistic freedom for all is
more important to the health of society then
the supplemental and extraneous incomes
derived from private copyright tariffs which
create a cultural climate of art control and Art
Police. No matter how valid the original intent
of our copyright laws may have been, they
are now clearly being subverted when they
are used to censor resented works, to
suppress the public need to reuse and
reshape information. and to garner purely
opportunistic incomes from any public use of
previously released cultural material which is,
in fact, already publicly available to everyone.
the U.S. Constitution clearly shows that the
original intent of copyright law was to
promote a public good, not a private one. No
one should be allowed to claim private
control over the creative process itself. This
struggle is essentially one of art against
business, and ultimately about which one
must make way for the other.
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