Fair use, based on my understanding, is the allowance for an outside party to use a copyrighted piece for purposes of a parody, to comment on, or to criticize without violating copyright laws. Essentially, anyone can use a copyrighted work without permission of the creator as long as it for the purposes such as those listed above.
Transformative use is based off of the concept of fair use and is the grounds by which the music artist "Girl Talk" produces his music legally. Transformative use means that an outside party can use a copyrighted work in a new or unexpected way. This allows people to essentially reproduce the work with their own spin on it, thus creating an entirely new piece.
As I previously mentioned, "Girl Talk" is a prime example of how transformative use allows us to recreate copyrighted pieces to ultimately create our own works. Girl Talk takes various songs from any genre and creates what is referred to as a mash-up, where all the songs are sampled, beat-matched, and combined to create one track. The final product is a sound that listeners are familiar with, yet unfamiliar with, all at once. We hear samples from songs we know well and identify to one source (the source being the primary artist), but hear them in a way we did not previously recognize. With this, Girl Talk is legally cleared by way of transformative use.
Girl Talk is not the only artist to capitalize on the rights granted to use by fair and transformative use. The music duo The White Panda, very similar to the music style of Girl Talk, has mastered the art of mash-ups with over 150,000 followers on SoundCloud. Another example of fair and transformative use, outside of the music industry, is Seth Grahame-Smith's collaborative work with deceased author Jane Austin to produce the novel "Pride and Prejudice, and Zombies." The novel, clearly based of the classic "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austin recreates the story to be essentially the same plus zombies roaming everywhere. Grahame-Smith is allowed to use the same characters and plot line of the classic legally due to his own spin placed on the story.
Here is one of my favorite White Panda mash-ups based off hits songs by
Notorious B.I.G. and Tom Petty.
You bring up some good points about transformative use. But do you think that Girl Talk's music is trasformative enough to clear him legally? He really only takes bits out and smashes them together without really changing the samples at all. I agree that he should be able to use the music under the fair use act and distribute it for free. I think he hasn't gotten in trouble yet because he hasn't tried to really monetize his music. Of course he gives away his music for free or a small charge, but the gains from it are minimal. If he were to try and make a lot of money off his music I think some of the larger record labels wouldn't be to happy about that.
ReplyDeleteI love the White Panda! Thankfully for Girl Talk, groups like the White Panda could do what they love to do in the manner in which they choose to do so by the steps he took to make sure that DJ's across the world could release music on the public domain with no penalties involved.
ReplyDeleteI believe that you have a good interpretation for the Transformative Use law. There are many DJ's and mash up artists that are able to compose their works due to this loophole.
ReplyDeleteI honestly don't think Girl Talk or any of these mashup artist's works are transformative, they are still technically the same song with other songs on top of each other. Also these artist's songs can still steal audiences from the original works due to the fact that the songs kiiiiiiiinda sound the same, which is one of the big points of transformative works.
ReplyDeleteP.S I only know this due to Dr. DJ Davey Spice and the Regs Class