Splicing and re-engineering pre-existing movie footage and creating an ersatz music video or an absurdist parody can provide a whole lot of entertainment for viewers and a whole lot of exposure for budding young artists. Some copyright holders, unfortunately, aren't overly concerned with art. What suffers as a result? Only the future of the internet as a venue to express creativity.

Stanford Law Professor and cyber-rights theorist Lawrence Lessig laments the desire of corporate interests to stymie budding young digital artists in his article on the Anime Music Video phenomenon for FT.com. In the case Lessig discusses, Wind Up Records are the ones doing the stifling. Lessig believes that this signals our traveling down the path to a "Read-Only" internet, and he's dead right. Creativity and interactivity go out the window when every pastiche, tribute, and artistic take on a pre-existing work is met with an intimidating cease-and-desist order.

An "Anime Music Video" results when a fan digitally chops up and pastes together footage from his/her favorite anime DVDs into an ersatz music video for a song. Lessig reports that it's primarily kids who are into it - and though I have my own opinions about the subcultural cult of anime nerd-dom, suffice it to say that grassroots video editing is cooler and probably a lot more valuable than anything that I was doing in high school. Not that listening to nothing but The Misfits for my entire junior year wasn't "cool," but I wish I could say that I'd been putting together highly cerebral art installations to the soundtrack of "Horror Business."

Lessig tells the tale of a website being asked to remove a slew of AMV's using the music of bands on the label:

Wind Up Records... did not like their fans’ love. A lawyer representing the company politely, though firmly, told the site carrying the 3,000 videos to take them down. A special filter now blocks any Wind Up Records content. The amateurs (in the original sense, meaning people who do it for love of the work and not for the money) who had been promoting artists such as Evanescence and Seether have presumably moved on to other art and other artists. No lawsuits were filed in the first legal threat against this exploding community of creators. But this promises not to be the last time lawyers speak to AMV creators.

What's most shocking about this situation at first glance is, of course, the notion that someone would like a song by a band on Wind Up Records enough to make a video for it (my apologies to any huge Scott Stapp fans out there, I guess.) However, the implications of the mindset behind shutting down DIY video artists, misguided as their musical tastes may be, is much more disturbing.

Lessig writes:

We are well on our way to perfecting the “Read-Only” internet – that network in which every bit of culture can be bought in a single click, but bought with the rights to consume only. 2006 will be a critical stage in this process.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened – In September of 2004, FenslerFilm received a cease and desist from Hasbro for their GI Joe PSA parodies.

The recut, dubbed GI Joe public service announcements were 25 brilliantly surreal forays into found-art absurdism and became instant subcultural cliches. In fact, they transcended subculture - they brought people together. One found references to the bizarre non-sequiturs that comprised the dialogue of the PSAs in the strangest places - in the office standing around the watercooler, at the bar, or at my house, where my housemate and I would regularly quote them liberally... obnoxiously, at the top of our lungs, in a drunken stupor.

Hasbro was not impressed with Fenslerfilm's indie-art achievement.

The question of if Fenslerfilm actually even transgressed copyright law or if Hasbro's claim was legally baseless is a whole different can of worms.

That aside, though, it's ironic that as corporations scramble to shut down those who would use the art that they "own" (note: not that they "had a hand in creating",) a similar form of absurd pastiche and digital video remixing has shown up on television. The Cartoon Network's remixes of classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons (including Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law) share real conceptual similarities with the Fenslerfilm parodies and Anime Music Videos.

I appreciate the afforementioned Cartoon Network shows. Really, I do. They're in a bit of a priviledged position as creators go, though. Most artists unfortunately can't afford to purchase a dying cartoon production company (see: Cartoon Network's purchase of Hanna-Barbara) just to create that particular brand of exformative (see David Foster Wallace's spiel on exformation in Laughing With Kafka) comedy. For the future of creativity's sake, they shouldn't have to.