The Once and Future Thing: Derivative Works
(Previously posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics, whose audience is less IP-centric.)
Reading through Urban’s The Once and Future Thing (nicely summarized by Derek), I was struck by how useful this might be for part of my intellectual property research. Then I came across Jen’s question:
How does culture move and progress if it is always at least tainted by the previous incarnation of culture?
I think the notion of derivative works is quite useful in working through Urban’s notions about accelerative culture. For those of you who aren’t intellectual property geeks, a derivative work is created when a previously existing work is “recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represents an original work of authorship, is a ‘derivative work’.“ (17 U.S.C. § 101 (1994).) The right to create derivative works is a right accorded to the copyright owner of texts, recordings, art, or videos under §106 of the copyright code. (There’s a much fuller discussion here, if you’re interested.) The Creative Commons movement as well as recent cases involving the legality of sampling have pushed the issue of derivative works to the front of the copyfight conversations.
One example I often use is Janet Jackson’s Got Til It’s Gone, which is a derivative work of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi. (Note to self: come up with example featuring artists I like.) Literary examples would include Moby Dick and Ahab’s Wife, Lolita and Lo’s Diary, or Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. In each of these cases, the major elements of a previously existing work were transformed into an arguably new work.
Urban’s definition of accelerative culture falls right in line with this:
By my definition, an ω expression is something new. It is accelerative in the sense that it takes old cultural elements - which can be microelements such as patterns of prenominal usage - and fuses them into new wholes.
We have no choice but to work with what we have; everyone gets their inspiration from something that already exists. Therefore, the only way the culture can possibly move forward is with the “taint of the previous incarnation.” I’ve been spending a lot of time this week extracting clips of Hail! Hail! Rock ’n Roll!, which follows Chuck Berry’s career up to 1987. As Eric Clapton notes late in the film, rock guitarists don’t have much choice but to work from the lines Chuck laid down. However, Chuck spends quite a bit of interview time explaining how he swiped composition ideas from most of the major Big Band and Blues players and then came up with his own lyrics. The rest of it he collaborated on with his pianist, Johnnie Johnson (although there is quite a bit of conjecture that Johnson was the primary author of many “Berry” compositions). All of the standards like Little Queenie, Carol, and Memphis, Tennessee are, to some extent, derivative works which then filtered on down through the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and countless other bands. All that transformed old stuff is what moved rock and roll forward.