Ripley reacts to a depressing news item about legendary dub mixer Scientist losing his battle to get some $$$ from Greensleeves Records’ licensing of tracks from Scientist Rids The World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires to Rockstar Games for Grand Theft Auto 3. The story quotes a Greensleeves legal droid:

Basically, Scientist was claiming to own copyrights in songs and recordings as a result of being the mixing engineer. Although we always felt these claims were ridiculous, we had to defend ourselves all the way to trial and are delighted to have got the right result.

Yes, that’s right: It’s “ridiculous” that he might own copyright in songs from an album with his damn name in the title.

I’ve been reading Harold Becker’s Art Worlds recently, and it’s made me realize a key problem with copyright. An “art world” is a network of people who cooperate to produce a work of art. What Becker shows is that any work of art is cooperatively produced in this way, even supposed paradigms of solo genius like novels or poems. Yet (in Western art worlds at least) we feel compelled to single out one person in the network as “the artist” and to demote everyone else involved to the level of “support personnel.” If you work in an art form where the role of mixing engineer has been elevated from “support personnel” to “artist,” well, too bad, you’re screwed, because the law knows who the real artist is, and it ain’t you.

The real problem isn’t misidentification of the artist, it’s the failure to realize that “intellectual property” is produced by networks, not individuals.

Mimi Ito has updated her “Media Mixes” paper for inclusion in an upcoming book entitled Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (which doesn’t have much web presence yet, but sounds right on). Anyway, it’s well worth checking out if you want to understand what the pervasive media ecology of the future (and for kids, the present) looks like. (Here’s hoping Dr. L. Ron Reacharoundasaurus will drop some science on us in the comments regarding whether she has her facts straight on the card gaming culture.)

I think she’s a little too easy on the corporations currently engineering the media mix; it’s pretty clear they could care less about empowering people and are all about the cold, hard cash. And let’s face it, they’re doing their best to keep this kind of thing illegal and marginal. But part of what we need to do is convince the media corporations that by loosening their grip and allowing peer-to-peer cultural production to move from the margins to the mainstream, they can solve some currently intractable problems. If we fail, we need to burn the whole thing down and start over.