Fair Use Blog Post

In the advancing and ever evolving digital world, the use of copyrighted material and the necessity of this fair use system have increased in controversy.  As digital art expands with the use of altered or transformed source material within new works of art, many artists would argue that an open content culture is necessary.  Despite the obstacles an artist may face within the creation of remixed work, the internet has commodified the use of plagiarism. The misuse and stealing of intellectual property is easier now more than ever.  One can simply search the internet for a variety of content to pass as one’s own in the blink of an eye. Although the principles of fair use can be difficult to navigate in the pursuit of remixed artwork, the policies in place to ensure the protection of intellectual property are incredibly important and within the benefit of the majority.  In contrast, these fair use policies must be used correctly as not to restrict freedom of speech. The digital world is a difficult one to police. It is my belief that it is impossible to catch every violator of fair use, therefore there must be reasonable standards for what is or is not fair use within the digital realm. For example, if an artist puts out a remixed work that is 80% source material with the intention to sell the work, this should be a violation of fair use.  If a student had made a similar work with a similar percentage of source material for a class without the intention to sell the work, then I do not believe this is a violation of fair use. The difficulty in all of this is the blurred lines of what is and is not acceptable, much of the discourse around fair use relies on an innate intuition and the value of the “golden rule” so to speak. It is my belief that regardless of what medium an artist uses, if the work requires the use of source material then its role in the final outcome of the work should be less than the labor of the artist or be entirely transformative.  For example, Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “Fountain” work demonstrated the power of endowing a found object with an entirely different meaning, thus transforming the work from it’s original significance or use. I believe Duchamp’s use of source material is entirely within the realm of fair use as the work became so much more than just a urinal therefore being transformed. An artist that does this exceptionally well is Arthur Jafa. Jafa is a contemporary video artist whose 2016 work entitled Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death became a worldwide sensation in the wake of the 2016 American Presidential election.  Jafa’s video piece combines hundreds of clips of depictions of African Americans ranging from professional athletes and pop stars to black face and violence.  These clips are quickly revealed to the viewer in five second bursts accompanied by Kanye West’s song “Ultralight Beam.” Jafa’s attention to detail and marrying of image and music completely transform both the song and clips into a greater message of racism and police brutality in the United States all compressed into a seven minute masterpiece.  Although I myself am not as refined as Arthur Jafa, his methodology has influenced much of my work. Within the last year I filmed and edited a video art piece on my own Puerto Rican heritage. This film is accompanied by a slam poem on the same topic for audio as paired with my images. Although in the end, the poem when combined with my work took on a life of its own, I found it difficult to balance both my work and the found audio.  I ultimately decided to credit the slam poet as a safeguard in fear that the poem itself would be attributed to my work as I did not want to claim any aspect of the work that wasn’t mine. Inevitably, fair use is tricky to follow and honor yet entirely necessary in the protection of intellectual property as well as the creation of standards of artistic integrity.