Negativland (page 4 of 4)

You never got a phone call?
No. The hit on their record was built on a sample from Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed which of course was cleared and paid for. We sampled from the Marky Mark song where he interrupts our sample with some kind of shout-out, where he’s dissing our sample, and we used it on our Fair Use CD. This is the 1990s version of how art and folk culture evolve. Our argument about appropriation and fair use is common sense. It’s so simple it’s not even worth talking about. It’s how ideas have always evolved. We’re all taking from each other and adding, recombining. It’s totally normal; it’s just that the technology’s changed, and the laws don’t take into account the new technology. You’ve got these old guys running giant companies, trying to control us in a way they were used to
controlling us twenty years ago, a hundred years ago, and they can’t anymore. Boy does
it make them mad. They’re just stomping their little feet. That’s one of the reasons why we encourage people to infringe.

Is Negativland a corporation?
We are legally a partnership. We were actually told by an accountant that becoming a corporation didn’t make a lot of sense. You have to have a board of directors, meetings.

What way would you encourage creative people to protect themselves from lawsuits with regard to copyright laws?
It depends on what you want to do. If you’re not making much money, then no one is going to care. You come to a corporation’s attention mostly because you are making money off something they feel they own. The more people who do this kind of thing, the more careful they’re going to be about who they pick to go after. In our book, Fair Use, we list everyone we sample. We’re very up front about it, “If you want to sue us, here’s where we took from. Go ahead Irving Berlin, or Led Zeppelin, or Ethel Merman.” I think any lawyer would look at our book and say, “I’m not suing these guys. Their book is called Fair Use, their CD is called Fair Use, if we sued them, we’d be doing them a service.”

The telecommunications bill appears to be the first step by a governing body to regulate these new technologies in relation to copyright laws.
Apparently there’s a white paper circulating about another bill that actually makes copyright infringement in any way, shape or form on the Internet a prosecutable offense. The server would be liable for the copying of any material that doesn’t belong to you, that you don’t have permission for.

This not only serves the Big Brother-like protection of intellectual property, but it also means that the only people who could afford to be on the Internet would be the big guys. They would be the only ones who have the money to defend themselves. The white paper would obliterate all the weird little servers out there. There are things that people can’t talk about on America Online. But if these bills go through, there will only be America Online. That is the corporate behemoth responding to this threat of the Internet: Shut it down.

It’s not as if it’s completely unpredictable. If you have something experiencing 80% growth-rate a month, governments and corporations will try to put toll booths and regulations in the way.
I think that the Internet is psychologically threatening to governments and corporations. The idea that people are running around having one-to-one communication with no one in between to mediate drives them crazy, and I don’t think it’s a conscious thing. Anyone who’s used to the power that one wields when you’re in government or running a corporation is directly threatened by the Internet.

With U2, we kept thinking, isn’t this a knee-jerk reaction from this giant record label? This is not personal, right? They just do this because they have to protect their property, right? Well, it is personal. They really hate us, and they really are angry. It’s an insult that we would dare to mess around with their property.

If there’s anything evil about corporations, it’s the structure. It doesn’t really matter who runs them; if you have someone who runs a company and wakes up one day extremely moral and ethical and concerned about his fellow humans, and wants to stop what his company is doing to the Pygmies in the rain forest, he’ll just get fired, and be replaced with someone who will do what they’re supposed to. Corporations are answerable only to their stockholders. I think of them as alien life forms. When people sue corporations, they can never go after individuals, because legally, the company is the individual. The corporation is never going to become ethical and moral. There is no reason to ever bother talking to a giant corporation that’s doing something that you find upsetting. The only thing you can talk to them about is money. So boycotts, I think, are a great way to have a conversation with a corporation.

There are a lot of successful boycotts. You don’t hear about them because it doesn’t behoove people in the mass media to promote boycotts. One of the things we’ve been advised to do with our current project is to tie a boycott in with it, from a legal standpoint this would make our project safer. That’s something we probably are going to do, I’m not sure how, to what degree. So it will end up being the most overtly oppositional project we’ve worked on. We’ll see how it turns out, maybe we’ll fall on our faces and end up making bad art. Which would be the worst thing of all. Worse than anything... worse than all the things I’ve been complaining about...

Additional information: www.negativland.com