Should Have Thought of That in 1967 (Whiter Shade of Pale Lawsuit)

New York Times
April 4, 2008, 11:08 am
Should Have Thought of That in 1967

By Patrick J. Lyons

“What took you so long?” has turned out to be an expensive question for Matthew Fisher.

You probably know his sound better than his name: Back in the day, as the organ player for the British rock band Procol Harum, he contributed that famous solo to the band’s 1967 hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

He left the band a few years later and pursued a career as a computer programmer, while the band’s singer, Gary Brooker, stuck with music, receding from stardom but still plugging away with modestly successful records and concert tours for decades. Not to mention cashing royalty checks from the enduring success of “A Whiter Shade of Pale”: music by Gary Brooker, lyrics by Keith Reid, it says on the band’s own recording and on the 600-odd cover versions that other artists have made over the years.

All that time, not a peep of public complaint from Matthew Fisher, not even when Procol Harum reunited briefly in the early 1990s to cut an album and play some concert dates — until 2005, that is, when Mr. Fisher decided to sue Mr. Brooker for millions in back royalties, claiming that his organ solo was a key to the song’s success and entitled him to credit as a co-writer.

Despite Mr. Brooker’s counter-arguments that the song was written before Mr. Fisher joined the band and that anyway the organ line was cribbed from Bach’s “Air on a G String,” Mr. Fisher won his point at trial in 2006, when a court ruled that he was indeed a co-composer of the hit song’s music.

But the money? Too late now, a British appeals court said today:

Judge John Mummery ruled that although Fisher had indeed co-created the song, the fact that it took him 38 years to bring the case to court meant he should not receive any financial benefit from it.

“Matthew Fisher is guilty of excessive and inexcusable delay in his claim to assert joint title to a joint interest in the work,” the judge said.

“He silently stood by and acquiesced in the defendant’s commercial exploitation of the work for 38 years.”

The decision restores full control of the copyright to Mr. Brooker, reversing the 2006 trial judge’s order that the men split ownership and future royalties (though not past ones) to the song.

A decades-long time lag also figured in another famous song-copyright battle, the fight over the authorship of a hit pop song of the 1940s, the Andrews Sisters number “Rum and Coca-Cola” — but in that case, only the borrowed melody was old. The plaintiff, who owned the copyright to a Calypso tune written in Trinidad around the turn of the 20th century, pressed his complaint soon after the Andrews Sisters version topped the charts. In the other case that everybody remembers, it was the litigation itself that dragged on for decades; the resemblance between George Harrison’s 1969 hit “My Sweet Lord” and the 1962 Chiffons tune “He’s So Fine” was the subject of legal back-and-forth almost immediately, but aspects of the case were still being hashed out in the courts in the 1990s.

Mr. Fisher can still appeal the “Whiter Shade of Pale” decision to the House of Lords, which serves as Britain’s supreme court. The British aristocracy might not prove the most receptive of audiences for his claim, though, considering the cavalcade of pop stars who have been knighted over the years, including Sir Paul, Sir Elton, Sir Mick and, oh yes, Gary Brooker, M.B.E.

Even without a further appeal, though, the case isn’t over yet: Still to be settled is who must pay whose legal bills, which are reported to have mounted well into the millions of pounds on each side.

Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport

Great video (labeled a work in progress) with artists and scholars discussing audio sampling. Saw it first on Audio Lemon via Copyright Criminals.

Video Explaining Copyright: A Fair(y) Use Tale

"Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms."
[he means Disney, of course! a clever cut and paste tour de force, all with a point]

Here is the link to the original host page at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

And here is the YouTube version:

Writing Under The Influence: Jonathan Lethem Ponders a Good Side to Plagiarism

Washington Post
Writing Under The Influence
Jonathan Lethem Ponders a Good Side to Plagiarism

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 16, 2007; C01

No, no, Jonathan Lethem concedes, he's not really in favor of plagiarism. At least not the deceptive, thieving kind.

But he does want to spark an argument that will "explode the word."

The Brooklyn-bred novelist ("Motherless Brooklyn," "Fortress of Solitude") is fascinated by what he calls "the mysteries of authorship -- the idea that things arise in culture that don't quite belong to anyone."

This fascination helped inspire his new novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," in which four identity-seeking 20-somethings in a Los Angeles rock band latch onto some striking words and images that don't quite belong to them, with consequences no one involved could have foreseen.

It also drove Lethem to make a more serious argument about "the fundamental appropriating nature of creativity" in a lengthy article that ran in the February issue of Harper's, titled "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism."

The subtitle is no joke.

After 10 pages of carefully constructed argument against "those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other," Lethem reveals that just about every line in his piece is something he "stole, warped, and cobbled together" from the work of others. He then annotates his borrowings, reporting, for example, that the "culture as a market" quote derives from "The Tyranny of Copyright?," by Robert Boynton, in the New York Times Magazine.

Lethem's piece is a brilliant stunt, a high-concept attention-grabber. In a letter to Harper's, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig -- one of the best-known public advocates for less restrictive copyright laws -- called it "beautifully crafted" argument that "teaches more about the importance of what I call 'remix' than any other work I have read."

Still, Lessig had a small bone to pick.

It seems some cherished words of his own had been appropriated, words the professor declined to specify but which constituted "the only sentence I have ever written that I truly like."

Ouch.

Lethem apologized.

Yet he couldn't resist ending his published response with a continuation of his argument.

"There are no quotation marks around the elements in a Robert Rauschenberg collage or around Quentin Tarantino's swipes from lesser-known movies," he wrote. And T.S. Eliot's immortal "The Waste Land," famous for its highbrow literary liftings, "has only end-notes -- which, I suspect, are much less often read than the poem itself."
'Searchers' on Mars

He's a harmless-looking fellow, this novelist-provocateur, especially compared with the brooding youth featured on the front cover of "You Don't Love Me Yet." Body stiff, no hint of a smile, shirt buttoned in the neck-choking fashion that inexplicably took hold a couple of decades back, the younger Lethem stares out at potential purchasers as if to say: Don't read this book, it's your loss. I'm too cool to care.

The midlife version -- at 43, he's "not a young writer anymore, but I'm not that old" -- has rounder features and a bit more bulk on his compact frame. Over lunch at Cafe Atlantico, Lethem (pronounced "Leethum") radiates seriousness about his work. But he also laughs easily and seizes the occasional opportunity to make fun of himself.

Was he ever part of a musical group, he is asked, when he was his characters' age?

"Barely," he says. "For just a minute, I was a kind of pathetic frontman for a band. My vocals could best be described as sub-Lou Reed mumblings."

His preoccupation with artistic influence, he says, really began with "a completely personal instinct or leaning, which is that I've always liked collage art." He likes seeing "chunks of recognizable things in a new matrix," whether in a painting or a Bob Dylan song. And because he believes this kind of aesthetic borrowing is "very near the center of the impulse to create in the first place," he finds it strange that some artists appear embarrassed by influences and feel the need to "overstate their originality."

Take, for example, his own first novel.

"Gun, With Occasional Music," Lethem says, was reviewed as being "a cross-fertilization of Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick." People would tell him, thinking it's what he wanted to hear, that his work was far more original than such a simplistic comparison could possibly convey.

"And I felt like saying: 'Well, actually, I was kind of trying to do Chandler meets Dick! I'm really glad it was clear what I was doing!'"

Or take "Girl in Landscape," the 1998 novel Lethem calls "a very deliberate attempt to rewrite John Ford's movie 'The Searchers' in an interplanetary context."

When plotting "Girl in Landscape," he used what he calls a "traditional kind of literary appropriating move, which you could call the 'Mary Reilly' move." He's referring to the Valerie Martin novel that retells the story of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from the point of view of the maid.

"I did 'The Searchers' from the point of view of the Natalie Wood character," he says. "On Mars."

And Ford's film was just one of his starting points.

Lethem goes on to cite "a number of books that I adore" with teenage girls as protagonists, among them "The Member of the Wedding," by Carson McCullers, and "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," by Shirley Jackson. Then he points to the even bigger -- yet totally unconscious -- influence of "one of the greatest novels ever written."

"I also, inadvertently, rewrote E.M. Forster's 'A Passage to India,' " he explains. "I constructed the book around a rape that may or may not have happened in a secret place."

"So this is a book that is all influences. And yet it's all mine."

Okay. But to get back to that Harper's piece: Influence is one thing, but surely plagiarism is another -- isn't it?

Yup.

"It's a provocation for me to be using the word 'plagiarism' the way I do," Lethem says, "and you could argue that I'm damaging its usual, more precise function." Employing it was "a way to get attention."

And yet:

Plagiarism is also a "rubbery" term he wanted to define as "value neutral" in order to confront the question "What's the good plagiarism and what's the bad plagiarism?"

Bad plagiarism, Lethem believes, is something we know when we see it. It doesn't add value by transforming the borrowed material into something new. It is deceptive, in that it refuses to acknowledge its influences. It can feel, particularly if the plagiarizer is a big cultural fish, like the worst kind of theft.

And good plagiarism? Think of Shakespeare's borrowing from Ovid, he says, which helped produce "Romeo and Juliet," and the subsequent borrowing by Leonard Bernstein that produced "West Side Story."

"If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism," Lethem wrote in his Harper's piece.

Except that he didn't write it, really.

As he acknowledges, he flat out stole that line from U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner.

Listen to Jonathan Lethem hold forth long enough and you'll come to understand that he sees the question of literary borrowing as part of a larger dialogue between private property and "the commons." He thinks that artists who take an absolutist position on copyright are complicit in "what is essentially an attack on the public good" -- the privatization of things "that should belong to everyone."

He's talking about copyright-obsessed corporations like Disney, which Lethem likens to a creative roach motel ("cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out"). He's talking about environmentally essential wetlands paved for private profit. He's talking about private fortunes exempted from estate taxes because they were supposedly amassed independently of the social fabric surrounding them. He's talking . . .

But hold on.

The man is supposed to be on a book tour here.

Time to get back to that lyrics-challenged rock band in L.A.
'Monster Eyes'

"You Don't Love Me Yet" is, among other things, Lethem's deliberate attempt to change gears after his previous novel, 2003's sprawling, ambitious "Fortress of Solitude." Lauded as "melancholy and marvelous" by New York Times critic A.O. Scott, "Fortress" tells the story of two motherless 1970s teens, one white and one black, growing up in the same not-yet-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood in which Lethem's idealistic and somewhat clueless parents chose to raise him and in which he lives today.

Many young fiction writers go straight to the autobiographical well, but Lethem waited -- and it paid off. "I couldn't have written 'Fortress of Solitude' without developing certain tools as a writer," he says. But when he'd finished, he was ready to be done with fathers and sons and Brooklyn for a while, to write something "mischievous and defiantly playful" once again.

The result was "You Don't Love Me Yet," an almost weightless tale of four Los Angeles band mates trying to negotiate that disconcerting, exhilarating stage of life in which parents are invisible, identities mutable, careers nonexistent and relationships about as stable as hydrogen.

Its one nod to seriousness?

Plagiarism is a central plot element.

To summarize briefly: Lethem's protagonist, Lucinda, is the bass player for a musical foursome so fledgling it hasn't yet settled on a name. To make its debut, the band needs more songs, but its perpetually malnourished songwriter is blocked. One of the other musicians sums up the grim situation this way:

"We're turning thirty and we haven't done anything. Look at Bedwin. He can't even feed himself, and he's our genius."

Help arrives after Lucinda is hired to answer a "complaint line" set up as part of a performance art piece. She gets attached to one of her regular callers, mesmerized by tales from his dysfunctional life. "I have this condition called monster eyes," the complainer tells her one day, and he goes on to explain that whenever he gets involved with a woman, he wrecks the relationship by boring in on some attribute of hers that he can't stand.

Cut to a rehearsal. Bedwin has written new music, but no lyrics.

"Monster eyes!" Lucinda finds herself calling out as the band hits the chorus. "Best thing I ever did for you, was get you out of range of my monster eyes."

She appropriates more of the complainer's language for more songs, and the band is on its way. But who, exactly, deserves the credit for this development? File under "mysteries of authorship." It's the kind of cultural collaboration that fascinates Lethem.

And it's all the more fascinating because -- as the author of "You Don't Love Me Yet" is quick to volunteer -- the novel itself started out as someone else's idea.

More than a decade ago, when Lethem was living in Berkeley, Calif., working in a bookstore and starting to write, he became friends with a grad student in English named Amy Greenstadt. "I had this idea that I wanted to make a video," says Greenstadt, who's now teaching at Portland State University, "but I didn't have the confidence to do it on my own."

So she asked Lethem if he'd like to help.

Greenstadt's idea originated with TV ads she'd seen for a New York "confession line." She thought: What if there were a really terrible band -- the kind, say, that did grunge covers of Joe Jackson songs -- and one of the members got intrigued with the confession line? She imagined many confessers, not just one, but when she and Lethem started working on the story together, "we came up with the idea of the one annoying confesser who eventually shows up and tries to join the band."

Neither of them knew anything about video, but they liked the idea of a collective art project, so they decided to bring in more collaborators. After a few weeks, however, "the whole thing just died, as these things often do."

Well, not quite.

"I'm very compulsive about narrative," Lethem says. "I don't leave a lot of unfinished stories lying around." A few years ago, he asked if he could use the material. Greenstadt readily agreed.

"He's the artist. I never would have done anything with it," she says -- though she did find herself "a little sad" that he changed her confession line to a complaint line.

Greenstadt says she finds Lethem's ideas on artistic influence and cultural borrowing intriguing. When he came through Oregon on his book tour, she invited him to speak at Portland State on the questions raised by his Harper's piece.

Still, she has a bottom line.

"As a teacher, I need to have plagiarism mean plagiarism," she says, and laughs. "We can't be messing with it."

[M&C NOTE: ORIGINAL ARTICLE APPEARS BELOW]

Jonathan Lethem--"The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism"

HARPER'S MAGAZINE, February 2007.

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .

—John Donne

LOVE AND THEFT (by Jonathan Letham)

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan's own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.

The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when one day I went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above. I know the lines, I confess, not from a college course but from the movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. I checked out 84, Charing Cross Road from the library in the hope of finding the Donne passage, but it wasn't in the book. It's alluded to in the play that was adapted from the book, but it isn't reprinted. So I rented the movie again, and there was the passage, read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but without attribution. Unfortunately, the line was also abridged so that, when I finally turned to the Web, I found myself searching for the line “all mankind is of one volume” instead of “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”

My Internet search was initially no more successful than my library search. I had thought that summoning books from the vasty deep was a matter of a few keystrokes, but when I visited the website of the Yale library, I found that most of its books don't yet exist as computer text. As a last-ditch effort I searched the seemingly more obscure phrase “every chapter must be so translated.” The passage I wanted finally came to me, as it turns out, not as part of a scholarly library collection but simply because someone who loves Donne had posted it on his homepage. The lines I sought were from Meditation 17 in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which happens to be the most famous thing Donne ever wrote, containing as it does the line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” My search had led me from a movie to a book to a play to a website and back to a book. Then again, those words may be as famous as they are only because Hemingway lifted them for his book title.

Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S. Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.
CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October '38,” Waters said. “I was fixin' a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin' Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There's been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out—Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin' Blues.' I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

Visual, sound, and text collage—which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)—became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate—Igor Stravinsky's music and Daniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon's paintings and Henry Darger's, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens's Bleak House to write The Bondwoman's Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their “plagiarized” elements, like Richard Condon's novels or Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons—it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

What happens when an allusion goes unrecognized? A closer look at The Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot's poem is a vertiginous mélange of quotation, allusion, and “original” writing. When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser's “Prothalamion” with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser's most popular, is unfamiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known largely because of Eliot's use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world. André Breton's maxim “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.

This “crisis” the surrealists identified was being simultaneously diagnosed by others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a certain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the “thingness” of objects.

The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could carry out this reanimating process automatically; the process of framing objects in a lens was often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the effect, Walter Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic apparatus and Freud's psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud's theories “isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception,” the photographic apparatus focuses on “hidden details of familiar objects,” revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.”

It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor exceptions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.

Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he'd himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it.

Consider Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative—to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance—is far worse. We're surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them.
USEMONOPOLY

The idea that culture can be property—intellectual property—is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. Corporations like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop owners who play background music in their stores; students and scholars are shamed from placing texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same time, copyright is revered by most established writers and artists as a birthright and bulwark, the source of nurture for their infinitely fragile practices in a rapacious world. Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely, as nature intended. His conception of copyright was enshrined in the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This was a balancing act between creators and society as a whole; second comers might do a much better job than the originator with the original idea.

But Jefferson's vision has not fared well, has in fact been steadily eroded by those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other. The distinctive feature of modern American copyright law is its almost limitless bloating—its expansion in both scope and duration. With no registration requirement, every creative act in a tangible medium is now subject to copyright protection: your email to your child or your child's finger painting, both are automatically protected. The first Congress to grant copyright gave authors an initial term of fourteen years, which could be renewed for another fourteen if the author still lived. The current term is the life of the author plus seventy years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that each time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain, the mouse's copyright term is extended.

Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology is exposing those restrictions as bizarre and arbitrary. When old laws fixed on reproduction as the compensable (or actionable) unit, it wasn't because there was anything fundamentally invasive of an author's rights in the making of a copy. Rather it was because copies were once easy to find and count, so they made a useful benchmark for deciding when an owner's rights had been invaded. In the contemporary world, though, the act of “copying” is in no meaningful sense equivalent to an infringement—we make a copy every time we accept an emailed text, or send or forward one—and is impossible anymore to regulate or even describe.

At the movies, my entertainment is sometimes lately preceded by a dire trailer, produced by the lobbying group called the Motion Picture Association of America, in which the purchasing of a bootleg copy of a Hollywood film is compared to the theft of a car or a handbag—and, as the bullying supertitles remind us, “You wouldn't steal a handbag!” This conflation forms an incitement to quit thinking. If I were to tell you that pirating DVDs or downloading music is in no way different from loaning a friend a book, my own arguments would be as ethically bankrupt as the MPAA's. The truth lies somewhere in the vast gray area between these two overstated positions. For a car or a handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of “intellectual property” leaves the original untouched. As Jefferson wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Yet industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating but from distributing, see the sale of culture as a zero-sum game. The piano-roll publishers fear the record companies, who fear the cassette-tape manufacturers, who fear the online vendors, who fear whoever else is next in line to profit most quickly from the intangible and infinitely reproducible fruits of an artist's labor. It has been the same in every industry and with every technological innovation. Jack Valenti, speaking for the MPAA: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language. The word “copyright” may eventually seem as dubious in its embedded purposes as “family values,” “globalization,” and, sure, “intellectual property.” Copyright is a “right” in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results. So let's try calling it that—not a right but a monopoly on use, a “usemonopoly”—and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly rights has always been counter to the public interest, no matter if it is Andrew Carnegie controlling the price of steel or Walt Disney managing the fate of his mouse. Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation's shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

A few years ago someone brought me a strange gift, purchased at MoMA's downtown design store: a copy of my own first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, expertly cut into the contours of a pistol. The object was the work of Robert The, an artist whose specialty is the reincarnation of everyday materials. I regard my first book as an old friend, one who never fails to remind me of the spirit with which I entered into this game of art and commerce—that to be allowed to insert the materials of my imagination onto the shelves of bookstores and into the minds of readers (if only a handful) was a wild privilege. I was paid $6,000 for three years of writing, but at the time I'd have happily published the results for nothing. Now my old friend had come home in a new form, one I was unlikely to have imagined for it myself. The gun-book wasn't readable, exactly, but I couldn't take offense at that. The fertile spirit of stray connection this appropriated object conveyed back to me—the strange beauty of its second use—was a reward for being a published writer I could never have fathomed in advance. And the world makes room for both my novel and Robert The's gun-book. There's no need to choose between the two.

In the first life of creative property, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold. After the commercial life has ended, our tradition supports a second life as well. A newspaper is delivered to a doorstep, and the next day wraps fish or builds an archive. Most books fall out of print after one year, yet even within that period they can be sold in used bookstores and stored in libraries, quoted in reviews, parodied in magazines, described in conversations, and plundered for costumes for kids to wear on Halloween. The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they've been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own—artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not “having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle”), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. “Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become “real” without being actively reworked: “Does it hurt?” Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: “It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney's protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.

This peculiar and specific act—the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner—is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. Think of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or some of the albums of Paul Simon or David Byrne: even without violating copyright, those creators have sometimes come in for a certain skepticism when the extent of their outsourcing became evident. And, as when Led Zeppelin found themselves sued for back royalties by the bluesman Willie Dixon, the act can occasionally be an expensive one. To live outside the law, you must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian Eno to recently launch a “remix” website, where anyone can download easily disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.

Kenneth Koch once said, “I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one's uniqueness upon the universe—après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

My reader may, understandably, be on the verge of crying, “Communist!” A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without some form of intellectual property. But it takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “property” doesn't capture. And works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy.

The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don't want to be bothered, and if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I'll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions—marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.

Yet one of the more difficult things to comprehend is that the gift economies—like those that sustain open-source software—coexist so naturally with the market. It is precisely this doubleness in art practices that we must identify, ratify, and enshrine in our lives as participants in culture, either as “producers” or “consumers.” Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received. Even if we've paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.

The way we treat a thing can change its nature, though. Religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies, body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept most famously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .” A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. I don't maintain that art can't be bought and sold, but that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising. This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at.

The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned—a tide of alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it inhibits the free action of the citizen, now reposited as a “potential entrepreneur.” Of course, in the real world, we know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these things can ruin them. We may be willing to peek at Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire or an eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, but only to reassure ourselves that some things are still beneath our standards of dignity.

What's remarkable about gift economies is that they can flourish in the most unlikely places—in run-down neighborhoods, on the Internet, in scientific communities, and among members of Alcoholics Anonymous. A classic example is commercial blood systems, which generally produce blood supplies of lower safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems. A gift economy may be superior when it comes to maintaining a group's commitment to certain extra-market values.
THE COMMONS

Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies—which dwell like ghosts in the commercial machine—is in the sense of a public commons. A commons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the commodities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it was written, continues to collect a fee. Einstein's theory of relativity is a commons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about celebrities is a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, impossibly fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those who compose it.

The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, partitioned, enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we've paid for as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They're not just an inventory of marketable assets; they're social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings. Some invasions of the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a commons of cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.

Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few.
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

Artists and intellectuals despondent over the prospects for originality can take heart from a phenomenon identified about twenty years ago by Don Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago. He called it “undiscovered public knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically surveying the scientific literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tackled effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals, waiting to be assembled by someone willing to read across specialties. Swanson himself did this in the case of Raynaud's syndrome, a disease that causes the fingers of young women to become numb. His finding is especially striking—perhaps even scandalous—because it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.

Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and publishers' notices: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor? Does solving certain scientific problems really require massive additional funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the same job more quickly and cheaply? Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?
GIVE ALL

A few years ago, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a retrospective of the works of Dariush Mehrjui, then a fresh enthusiasm of mine. Mehrjui is one of Iran's finest filmmakers, and the only one whose subject was personal relationships among the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Needless to say, opportunities to view his films were—and remain—rare indeed. I headed uptown for one, an adaptation of J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, titled Pari, only to discover at the door of the Walter Reade Theater that the screening had been canceled: its announcement had brought threat of a lawsuit down on the Film Society. True, these were Salinger's rights under the law. Yet why would he care that some obscure Iranian filmmaker had paid him homage with a meditation on his heroine? Would it have damaged his book or robbed him of some crucial remuneration had the screening been permitted? The fertile spirit of stray connection—one stretching across what is presently seen as the direst of international breaches—had in this case been snuffed out. The cold, undead hand of one of my childhood literary heroes had reached out from its New Hampshire redoubt to arrest my present-day curiosity.

A few assertions, then:

Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture. A map-turned-to-landscape, it has moved to a place beyond enclosure or control. The authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least the price of a rare success.

A corporation that has imposed an inescapable notion—Mickey Mouse, Band-Aid—on the cultural language should pay a similar price.

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate.

Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act. Arguments in its favor are as un-American as those for the repeal of the estate tax.

Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture.

Digital sampling is an art method like any other, neutral in itself.

Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn—radio, the Internet—the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty.

The dream of a perfect systematic remuneration is nonsense. I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the same moment offer them for almost nothing to impoverished literary quarterlies, or speak them for free into the air in a radio interview. So what are they worth? What would they be worth if some future Dylan worked them into a song? Should I care to make such a thing impossible?

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.

As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.
* * *
KEY: I IS ANOTHER

This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted in red. Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.
TITLE

The phrase “the ecstasy of influence,” which embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom's “anxiety of influence,” is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.
LOVE AND THEFT

“. . . a cultivated man of middle age . . .” to “. . . hidden, unacknowledged memory?” These lines, with some adjustments for tone, belong to the anonymous editor or assistant who wrote the dust-flap copy of Michael Maar's The Two Lolitas. Of course, in my own experience, dust-flap copy is often a collaboration between author and editor. Perhaps this was also true for Maar.

“The history of literature . . .” to

“. . . borrow and quote?” comes from Maar's book itself.

“Appropriation has always . . .” to “. . . Ishmael and Queequeg . . .” This paragraph makes a hash of remarks from an interview with Eric Lott conducted by David McNair and Jayson Whitehead, and incorporates both interviewers' and interviewee's observations. (The text-interview form can be seen as a commonly accepted form of multivocal writing. Most interviewers prime their subjects with remarks of their own—leading the witness, so to speak—and gently refine their subjects' statements in the final printed transcript.)

“I realized this . . .” to “. . . for a long time.” The anecdote is cribbed, with an elision to avoid appropriating a dead grandmother, from Jonathan Rosen's The Talmud and the Internet. I've never seen 84, Charing Cross Road, nor searched the Web for a Donne quote. For me it was through Rosen to Donne, Hemingway, website, et al.

“When I was thirteen . . .” to “. . . no plagiarist at all.” This is from William Gibson's “God's Little Toys,” in Wired magazine. My own first encounter with William Burroughs, also at age thirteen, was less epiphanic. Having grown up with a painter father who, during family visits to galleries or museums, approvingly noted collage and appropriation techniques in the visual arts (Picasso, Claes Oldenburg, Stuart Davis), I was gratified, but not surprised, to learn that literature could encompass the same methods.
CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

“In 1941, on his front porch . . .” to “. . . ‘this song comes from the cotton field.'” Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs.

“. . . enabled by a kind . . . freely reworked.” Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression. In Owning Culture, McLeod notes that, as he was writing, he

happened to be listening to a lot of old country music, and in my casual listening I noticed that six country songs shared exactly the same vocal melody, including Hank Thompson's “Wild Side of Life,” the Carter Family's “I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” Roy Acuff's “Great Speckled Bird,” Kitty Wells's “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” Reno & Smiley's “I'm Using My Bible for a Roadmap,” and Townes Van Zandt's “Heavenly Houseboat Blues.” . . . In his extensively researched book, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll, Nick Tosches documents that the melody these songs share is both “ancient and British.” There were no recorded lawsuits stemming from these appropriations. . . .

“. . . musicians have gained . . . through allusion.” Joanna Demers, Steal This Music.

“In Seventies Jamaica . . .” to “. . . hours of music.” Gibson.

“Visual, sound, and text collage . . .” to “. . . realm of cultural production.” This plunders, rewrites, and amplifies paragraphs from McLeod's Owning Culture, except for the line about collage being the art form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I heard filmmaker Craig Baldwin say, in defense of sampling, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals.

“In a courtroom scene . . .” to “. . . would cease to exist.” Dave Itzkoff, New York Times.

“. . . the remarkable series of ‘plagiarisms' . . .” to “. . . we want more plagiarism.” Richard Posner, combined from The Becker-Posner Blog and The Atlantic Monthly.

“Most artists are brought . . .” to “. . . by art itself.” These words, and many more to follow, come from Lewis Hyde's The Gift. Above any other book I've here plagiarized, I commend The Gift to your attention.

“Finding one's voice . . . filiations, communities, and discourses.” Semanticist George L. Dillon, quoted in Rebecca Moore Howard's “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism.”

“Inspiration could be . . . act never experienced.” Ned Rorem, found on several “great quotations” sites on the Internet.

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted . . . out of chaos.” Mary Shelley, from her introduction to Frankenstein.

“What happens . . .” to “. . . contamination anxiety.” Kevin J.H. Dettmar, from “The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism.”
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

“The surrealists believed . . .” to the Walter Benjamin quote. Christian Keathley's Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, a book that treats fannish fetishism as the secret at the heart of film scholarship. Keathley notes, for instance, Joseph Cornell's surrealist-influenced 1936 film Rose Hobart, which simply records “the way in which Cornell himself watched the 1931 Hollywood potboiler East of Borneo, fascinated and distracted as he was by its B-grade star”—the star, of course, being Rose Hobart herself. This, I suppose, makes Cornell a sort of father to computer-enabled fan-creator reworkings of Hollywood product, like the version of George Lucas's The Phantom Menace from which the noxious Jar Jar Binks character was purged; both incorporate a viewer's subjective preferences into a revision of a filmmaker's work.

“. . . early in the history of photography” to “. . . without compensating the source.” From Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, the greatest of public advocates for copyright reform, and the best source if you want to get radicalized in a hurry.

“For those whose ganglia . . .” to

“. . . discourse broke down.” From David Foster Wallace's essay “E Unibus Pluram,” reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I have no idea who Wallace's “gray eminence” is or was. I inserted the example of Dickens into the paragraph; he strikes me as overlooked in the lineage of authors of “brand-name” fiction.

“I was born . . . Mary Tyler Moore Show.” These are the reminiscences of Mark Hosler from Negativland, a collaging musical collective that was sued by U2's record label for their appropriation of “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.” Although I had to adjust the birth date, Hosler's cultural menu fits me like a glove.

“The world is a home . . . pop-culture products . . .” McLeod.

“Today, when we can eat . . .” to “. . . flat sights.” Wallace.

“We're surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” This phrase, which I unfortunately rendered somewhat leaden with the word “imperative,” comes from Steve Erickson's novel Our Ecstatic Days.
USEMONOPOLY

“. . . everything from attempts . . .” to “defendants as young as twelve.” Robert Boynton, The New York Times Magazine, “The Tyranny of Copyright?”

“A time is marked . . .” to “. . . what needs no defense.” Lessig, this time from The Future of Ideas.

“Thomas Jefferson, for one . . .” to “‘. . . respective Writings and Discoveries.'” Boynton.

“. . . second comers might do a much better job than the originator

. . .” I found this phrase in Lessig, who is quoting Vaidhyanathan, who himself is characterizing a judgment written by Learned Hand.

“But Jefferson's vision . . . owned by someone or other.” Boynton.

“The distinctive feature . . .” to “. . . term is extended.” Lessig, again from The Future of Ideas.

“When old laws . . .” to “. . . had been invaded.” Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright.

“‘I say to you . . . woman home alone.'” I found the Valenti quote in McLeod. Now fill in the blank: Jack Valenti is to the public domain as ______ is to ________.
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

“In the first . . .” to “. . . builds an archive.” Lessig.

“Most books . . . one year . . .” Lessig.

“Active reading is . . .” to “. . . do not own . . .” This is a mashup of Henry Jenkins, from his Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, and Michel de Certeau, whom Jenkins quotes.

“In the children's classic . . .” to

“. . . its loving use.” Jenkins. (Incidentally, have the holders of the copyright to The Velveteen Rabbit had a close look at Toy Story? There could be a lawsuit there.)
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

“The Walt Disney Company . . . alas, Treasure Planet . . .” Lessig.

“Imperial Plagiarism” is the title of an essay by Marilyn Randall.

“. . . spurred David Byrne . . . My Life in the Bush of Ghosts . . .” Chris Dahlen, Pitchfork—though in truth by the time I'd finished, his words were so utterly dissolved within my own that had I been an ordinary cutting-and-pasting journalist it never would have occurred to me to give Dahlen a citation. The effort of preserving another's distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was sometimes beyond my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.

“Kenneth Koch . . .” to “. . . déluge of copycats!” Emily Nussbaum, The New York Times Book Review.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

“You can't steal a gift.” Dizzy Gillespie, defending another player who'd been accused of poaching Charlie Parker's style: “You can't steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.''

“A large, diverse society . . . intellectual property.” Lessig.

“And works of art . . . ” to “. . .

marriage, parenthood, mentorship.” Hyde.

“Yet one . . . so naturally with the market.” David Bollier, Silent Theft.

“Art that matters . . .” to “. . . bought and sold.” Hyde.

“We consider it unacceptable . . .” to “‘. . . certain unalienable Rights . . .'” Bollier, paraphrasing Margaret Jane Radin's Contested Commodities.

“A work of art . . .” to “. . . constraint upon our merchandising.” Hyde.

“This is the reason . . . person it's directed at.” Wallace.

“The power of a gift . . .” to “. . . certain extra-market values.” Bollier, and also the sociologist Warren O. Hagstrom, whom Bollier is paraphrasing.
THE COMMONS

“Einstein's theory . . .” to “. . . public domain are a commons.” Lessig.

“That a language is a commons . . . society as a whole.” Michael Newton, in the London Review of Books, reviewing a book called Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language by Daniel Heller-Roazen. The paraphrases of book reviewers are another covert form of collaborative culture; as an avid reader of reviews, I know much about books I've never read. To quote Yann Martel on how he came to be accused of imperial plagiarism in his Booker-winning novel Life of Pi,

Ten or so years ago, I read a review by John Updike in the New York Times Review of Books [sic]. It was of a novel by a Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar. I forget the title, and John Updike did worse: he clearly thought the book as a whole was forgettable. His review—one of those that makes you suspicious by being mostly descriptive . . . oozed indifference. But one thing about it struck me: the premise. . . . Oh, the wondrous things I could do with this premise.

Unfortunately, no one was ever able to locate the Updike review in question.

“The American commons . . .” to

“. . . for a song.” Bollier.

“Honoring the commons . . .” to

“. . . practical necessity.” Bollier.

“We in Western . . . public good.” John Sulston, Nobel Prize‒winner and co-mapper of the human genome.

“We have to remain . . .” to “. . . benefit of a few.” Harry S Truman, at the opening of the Everglades National Park. Although it may seem the height of presumption to rip off a president—I found claiming Truman's stolid advocacy as my own embarrassing in the extreme—I didn't rewrite him at all. As the poet Marianne Moore said, “If a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better?” Moore confessed her penchant for incorporating lines from others' work, explaining, “I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition.”
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

“. . . intellectuals despondent . . .” to “. . . quickly and cheaply?” Steve Fuller, The Intellectual. There's something of Borges in Fuller's insight here; the notion of a storehouse of knowledge waiting passively to be assembled by future users is suggestive of both “The Library of Babel” and “Kafka and his Precursors.”
GIVE ALL

“. . . one of Iran's finest . . .” to “. . . meditation on his heroine?” Amy Taubin, Village Voice, although it was me who was disappointed at the door of the Walter Reade Theater.

“The primary objective . . .” to “. . . unfair nor unfortunate.” Sandra Day O'Connor, 1991.

“. . . the future will be much like the past” to “. . . give some things away.” Open-source film archivist Rick Prelinger, quoted in McLeod.

“Change may be troubling . . . with certainty.” McLeod.

“. . . woven entirely . . .” to “. . . without inverted commas.” Roland Barthes.

“The kernel, the soul . . .” to “. . . characteristics of phrasing.” Mark Twain, from a consoling letter to Helen Keller, who had suffered distressing accusations of plagiarism (!). In fact, her work included unconsciously memorized phrases; under Keller's particular circumstances, her writing could be understood as a kind of allegory of the “constructed” nature of artistic perception. I found the Twain quote in the aforementioned Copyrights and Copywrongs, by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

“Old and new . . .” to “. . . we all quote.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. These guys all sound alike!

“People live differently . . . wealth as a gift.” Hyde.

“. . . I'm a cork . . .” to “. . . blown away.” This is adapted from The Beach Boys song “'Til I Die,” written by Brian Wilson. My own first adventure with song-lyric permissions came when I tried to have a character in my second novel quote the lyrics “There's a world where I can go and/Tell my secrets to/In my room/In my room.” After learning the likely expense, at my editor's suggestion I replaced those with “You take the high road/I'll take the low road/I'll be in Scotland before you,” a lyric in the public domain. This capitulation always bugged me, and in the subsequent British publication of the same book I restored the Brian Wilson lyric, without permission. Ocean of Story is the title of a collection of Christina Stead's short fiction.

Saul Bellow, writing to a friend who'd taken offense at Bellow's fictional use of certain personal facts, said: “The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing.” I couldn't bring myself to retain Bellow's “strength,” which seemed presumptuous in my new context, though it is surely the more elegant phrase. On the other hand, I was pleased to invite the suggestion that the gifts in question may actually be light and easily lifted.
KEY TO THE KEY

The notion of a collage text is, of course, not original to me. Walter Benjamin's incomplete Arcades Project seemingly would have featured extensive interlaced quotations. Other precedents include Graham Rawle's novel Diary of an Amateur Photographer, its text harvested from photography magazines, and Eduardo Paolozzi's collage-novel Kex, cobbled from crime novels and newspaper clippings. Closer to home, my efforts owe a great deal to the recent essays of David Shields, in which diverse quotes are made to closely intertwine and reverberate, and to conversations with editor Sean Howe and archivist Pamela Jackson. Last year David Edelstein, in New York magazine, satirized the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism case by creating an almost completely plagiarized column denouncing her actions. Edelstein intended to demonstrate, through ironic example, how bricolage such as his own was ipso facto facile and unworthy. Although Viswanathan's version of “creative copying” was a pitiable one, I differ with Edelstein's conclusions.

The phrase Je est un autre, with its deliberately awkward syntax, belongs to Arthur Rimbaud. It has been translated both as “I is another” and “I is someone else,” as in this excerpt from Rimbaud's letters:

For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I make a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths, or springs on to the stage.

If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming to be, themselves, the authors!

Gilberto Gil, Digital Arts, and Intellectual Property

New York Times
March 11, 2007
Music
Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved
By LARRY ROHTER

SALVADOR, Brazil

ON Wednesday the Brazilian minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, is scheduled to speak about intellectual property rights, digital media and related topics at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Two nights later the singer, songwriter and pop star Gilberto Gil begins a three-week North American concert tour.

Rarely do the worlds of politics and the arts converge as unconventionally as in the person of Mr. Gil, whose itinerary includes a solo performance at Carnegie Hall on March 20. More than 40 years after he first picked up a guitar and sang in public, Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira is an anomaly: He doesn’t just make music, he also makes policy.

And as the music, film and publishing industries struggle to adapt to the challenge of content proliferating on the Internet, Mr. Gil has emerged as a central player in the global search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works. In the process his twin roles have sometimes generated competing priorities that he has sought to harmonize.

As a creator of music, he is interested in protecting copyrights. But as a government official in a developing country celebrated for the creative pulse of its people, Mr. Gil also wants Brazilians to have unfettered access to new technologies to make and disseminate art, without having to surrender their rights to the large companies that dominate the culture industry.

“I think we are moving rapidly toward the obsolescence and eventual disappearance of a single traditional model and its replacement by others that are hybrids,” Mr. Gil said in a February interview at his home here in northeast Brazil, one day before the start of Carnival. “My personal view is that digital culture brings with it a new idea of intellectual property, and that this new culture of sharing can and should inform government policies.”

Raised in the poor, arid interior of the Brazilian northeast, Mr. Gil, 64, has been straddling disparate worlds most of his life. No black Brazilian had ever served as a cabinet minister before he was appointed four years ago, and as a young man fresh out of college he worked for a multinational company at a time when few black Brazilians had access to such jobs. Later, during a military dictatorship, he was jailed and then forced into exile in Britain.

After returning to Brazil in the 1970s he made records that urged black Brazilians to reconnect with their African roots, and was an early champion here of Bob Marley and reggae. But Mr. Gil has also read widely in Asian philosophy and religions and follows a macrobiotic diet, leading the songwriter, producer and critic Nelson Motta to describe his style as “Afro-Zen.”

In person Mr. Gil is warm, calm and engaging, a slim, dreadlocked figure with an elfin, humorous quality that tends to disarm critics. As both individual and artist he has always tended to be open-minded and eclectic in his tastes; the poet Torquato Neto once said of him, “There are many ways of singing and making Brazilian music, and Gilberto Gil prefers all of them.”

A fascination with technology has been another constant in Mr. Gil’s long career. He wrote his first song about computers, called “Electronic Brain,” back in the 1960s, and has regularly returned to the theme in compositions like “Satellite Dish” and “On the Internet,” which was written in the early 1990s and contains this verse:

I want to get on the Web

Promote a debate

Bring together on the Internet

A group of fans from Connecticut

I want to go on the Web to contact

Homes in Nepal and bars in Gabon

“I don’t think there is anyone quite like Gil anywhere in the world,” said John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist who is a friend and the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the groups in the forefront of the drive to reform the current intellectual property rights system. “He’s a spearhead. He’s been thinking about I.P. issues forever and clearly gets the importance of all of this. But he’s also in a unique position to implement his ideas.”

One of Mr. Gil’s first actions after becoming culture minister in 2003 was to form an alliance between Brazil and the nascent Creative Commons movement. Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is meant to offer an alternative to the traditional copyright system of “all rights reserved,” which the movement’s adherents — from scientists and artists to lawyers and consumers — believe has impeded creativity and the sharing of knowledge in the Internet age.

In its place Creative Commons has devised a more flexible structure that allows artists to decide what part of their copyright they wish to retain and what part they are willing to share with the public. With input from Mr. Gil and many others, the organization has created licenses that permit creators and consumers to copy, remix or sample a digital work of art, so long as the originator is properly credited.

More than 145 million works have been registered with Creative Commons licenses, including videos, photographs, written texts, blogs and of course music. Because Brazil is “a country that has music in its genetic code,” to use Mr. Barlow’s phrase, and because Brazilian music has become a global force, the idea of loosening the automatic control of artistic works by a handful of conglomerates headquartered a hemisphere away has resonated strongly here.

“Look at remixing on music sites, which has become a core of creativity on the Internet and produced a huge archive of legally usable music,” said Lawrence Lessig, the author of “Free Culture” and founder of Creative Commons. “That has allowed a whole bunch of people to display themselves as artists and be picked up by record labels and Web sites, and all of that began because Gil got us to think about what kind of freedom was necessary for music.”

As culture minister Mr. Gil has also sponsored an initiative called the Cultural Points program. Small government grants are issued to scores of community centers in poor neighborhoods of some of Brazil’s largest cities to install recording and video studios and teach residents how to use them.

The result has been an outpouring of video and music, much of it racially conscious and politically tinged rap or electronica. Since Brazilian commercial radio, which is said to be riddled with payola, will not play the new music, the creators instead broadcast their songs on community radio stations and distribute their CDs independently, at markets and fairs, rather than through existing record labels.

With that project, “you’re now creating freely licensed content and demonstrating the creativity latent in the society,” Mr. Lessig said.

Brazil’s official stance on digital content and intellectual property rights is in large part derived from Mr. Gil’s own experience. In the late ’60s he and his close friend Caetano Veloso, along with a handful of others here and in São Paulo, started the movement known as Tropicalismo, which blended avant-garde poetry, pop influences from abroad and home-grown musical styles then scorned as corny and déclassé.

In a way, the Tropicalistas engaged in sampling before digital sampling existed, using cut-and-paste, mix-and-match collage techniques that are common now but were considered bizarre at the time. In recent years their music and approach has been embraced by pop performers as diverse as David Byrne, Nirvana, Beck, Nelly Furtado and Devendra Banhart.

When “world music” first appeared in the United States and Europe and Mr. Byrne, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and others began incorporating Brazilian rhythms into their work, Mr. Gil was initially skeptical of the phenomenon, complaining of “cultural safaris” by adventurers in Land Rovers “looking for all the rare specimens.” But thanks in large part to technological advances, he said, that practice has “changed completely,” and pop stars are now “more respectful” of other cultures.

“Today the hegemony of the North has, in a certain form, been broken,” he said. “Local tendencies are allowed to manifest themselves and adopt their own languages and forms of packaging. It’s no longer that vision of transforming some regional raw material into a single, standardized product. Today you have all kinds of local scenes that utilize universal elements,” like Brazilian, South African and Arab rap.

As a Tropicalista, Mr. Gil was also involved in an episode that is Brazil’s equivalent of Bob Dylan being booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. When the Tropicalistas played electric guitars and rock rhythms at a São Paulo song festival in 1967, they were jeered and accused of being agents of American imperialism who were trying to impose noxious foreign influences on Brazilian music.

Mr. Gil’s complaints about the inequities of copyrights are derived in part from his own experience. Like many other musicians he signed contracts early in his career that essentially gave away publishing rights to the songs he wrote. But he waged a seven-year court battle to regain his rights, which ended recently with a favorable ruling that opens the door for other Brazilian artists to regain their rights as well.

“The old contracts were completely concessionary, in which all rights over the work were ceded to the contract holder, in absolute form,” he said. “I fought to bring my own work back under my control, arguing that there exists a unilateral right to break the contract. And we won. It was the first time this happened in Brazil, based on an artist’s rescinding a contract, and without a negotiated accord.”

Now that Mr. Gil has regained ownership of his own catalog of more than 400 songs, he is putting the concept of “copyleft,” as the alternative system is sometimes called, into practice. He retains all rights on some songs, some rights on others and declaring “no rights reserved” on others, which are now free for others for use in remixes or videos.

With such an approach an artist “no longer needs to transfer the administration of his rights to an entity called the record company, the movie studio or the song publisher,” Mr. Gil said. “He can do it himself.”

DESPITE all his brushes with politics over the years, it was only at the end of the ’80s, when he was elected to the City Council here in Brazil’s third-largest city, that Mr. Gil ventured into conventional party politics. His constituency was an unusual mixture of poor and working-class blacks and middle-class, mostly white, environmentalists.

But he withdrew after one term, turning aside requests he run for Brazil’s Congress by saying he was tired of partisan bickering and wanted to resume his performing career. Many Brazilians were therefore surprised when he jumped back into politics after the country’s first left-wing government was elected in 2002 and he was offered the cabinet post of culture minister, and then again late last year when he agreed to stay on for a second term.

“I still don’t like politics,” he said. “I’d rather see my position in the government as that of an administrator or manager. But politics is a necessary ingredient. You have politics in the government, with ministers, on the issue of how the budget is divided, the cake sliced up, the distribution of resources. You have to choose priorities, to tend to some and not to others.”

Mr. Gil’s tenure has not been without controversy. He is a member of the Green Party, not the ruling Workers’ Party, so when he was first appointed, some party loyalists were miffed that the job had not gone to one of their own, and responded with manifestos criticizing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s choice of a pop star thought to be ideologically suspect.

“You have to remember that Tropicalismo was fought by the traditional Stalinist left, and that even today some of those same people are in the Workers Party and the unions,” said Mr. Motta, who is also the author of “Tropical Nights,” a history of Brazilian popular music since the 1960s. “They want to bring culture under state control and know nothing about the digital world and the Internet, so of course they oppose a true revolutionary like Gil, who has always pushed for new things.”

Since Mr. Gil became minister, Brazilian government spending on culture has grown by more than 50 percent, testimony both to his prestige and negotiating skills. As minister he has devoted time to selling Brazilian music abroad, but has also labored to draw attention to Brazilian film, painting, sculpture and literature in foreign markets.

“One thing to remember about Gil,” said Hermano Vianna, an anthropologist, writer and a leading figure in Brazil’s digital culture movement, is that “he sees culture not just as art, but also as an industry. To Gil culture is not just an accessory but an important part of the economy and even a motor of economic development.”

Over the last four years, though, Mr. Gil has cut way back on his own performances, the part of being a musician he says he enjoys most, and nearly stopped recording. His most recent disc, “Gil Luminoso,” is a collection of 15 of his songs, including “Electronic Brain,” that he rerecorded in 1999 with just voice and guitar, to accompany a book about him.

Why give up something as gratifying as playing music for the wear and tear of public administration? “Life is not just pleasure,” he said. “The first phrase of the Vedic scriptures is that ‘All is suffering.’ Difficulty is stimulating, challenging, it’s an element of the pulse of life.”

Besides, he is at a point in life “where I no longer want to have a commitment to my career, in the classical sense of a profession,” he said. “I no longer see music as a field to be exploited. I see it now as an alternative area of action, part of a broad repertory of possibilities that I have. Music is something visceral in me, something that exudes from me, and even when I’m not thinking about it, I will still be making music, always.”

Music Industry Battles mixtapes

February 18, 2007
Hip-Hop Outlaw (Industry Version)
By SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 16, a SWAT team from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, backed up by officers from the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office and the local police department, along with a few drug-sniffing dogs, burst into a unmarked recording studio on a short, quiet street in an industrial neighborhood near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The officers entered with their guns drawn; the local police chief said later that they were “prepared for the worst.” They had come to serve a warrant for the arrest of the studio’s owners on the grounds that they had violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO, a charge often used to lock up people who make a business of selling drugs or breaking people’s arms to extort money. The officers confiscated recording equipment, cars, computers and bank statements along with more than 25,000 music CDs. Two of the three owners of the studio, Tyree Simmons, who is 28, and Donald Cannon, who is 27, were arrested and held overnight in the Fulton County jail. Eight employees, mostly interns from local colleges, were briefly detained as well.

Later that night, a reporter for the local Fox TV station, Stacey Elgin, delivered a report on the raid from the darkened street in front of the studio. She announced that the owners of the studio, known professionally as DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, were arrested for making “illegal CDs.” The report cut to an interview with Matthew Kilgo, an official with the Recording Industry Association of America, who was involved in the raid. The R.I.A.A., a trade and lobbying group that represents the major American record labels, works closely with the Department of Justice and local police departments to crack down on illegal downloading and music piracy, which most record-company executives see as a dire threat to their business.

Kilgo works in the R.I.A.A.’s Atlanta office, and in the weeks before the raid, the local police chief said, R.I.A.A. investigators helped the police collect evidence and conduct surveillance at the studio. Kilgo consulted with the R.I.A.A.’s national headquarters in advance of the raid, and after the raid, a team of men wearing R.I.A.A. jackets was responsible for boxing the CDs and carting them to a warehouse for examination.

If anyone involved with the raid knew that the men they had arrested were two of the most famous D.J.’s in the country, they didn’t let on while the cameras were rolling. For local law enforcement, the raid on Drama and Cannon’s studio was no different from a raid they executed in October on an Atlanta factory where a team of illegal immigrants was found making thousands of copies of popular DVDs and CDs to sell on the street. Along with the bootlegged CDs, the police found weapons and a stash of drugs in the factory. (The Fox report on the DJ Drama raid included a shot of a grave-looking police officer saying, “In this case we didn’t find drugs or weapons, but it’s not uncommon for us to find other contraband.”)

But Drama and Cannon’s studio was not a bootlegging plant; it was a place where successful new hip-hop CDs were regularly produced and distributed. Drama and Cannon are part of a well-regarded D.J. collective called the Aphilliates. Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.

The CDs made in the Aphilliates’ studio are called mixtapes — album-length compilations of 20 or so songs, often connected by a theme; they are produced and mixed by a D.J. and usually “hosted” by a rapper, well known or up-and-coming, who peppers the disc with short boasts, shout-outs or promotions for an upcoming album. Some mixtapes are part of an ongoing series — in the last few years, the Aphilliates have produced 16 numbered installments of “Gangsta Grillz,” an award-winning series that focuses on Southern hip-hop; others represent a one-time deal, a quick way for a rapper to respond to an insult or to remind fans he exists between album releases. The CDs are packaged in thin plastic jewel cases with low-quality covers and are sold at flea markets and independent record stores and through online clearinghouses like mixtapekingz.com. A mixtape can consist of remixes of hit songs — for instance, the Aphilliates offered a CD of classic Michael Jackson songs doctored by a Detroit D.J. Or it can feature a rapper “freestyling,” or improvising raps, over the beat from another artist’s song; so, on one mixtape, LL Cool J’s “Love You Better” became 50 Cent’s “After My Cheddar.” In most cases, the D.J. modifies the original song without acquiring the rights to it, and if he wants to throw in a sample of Ray Charles singing or a line from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, he doesn’t worry about copyright. The language on mixtapes is raw and uncensored; rappers sometimes devote a whole CD to insulting another rapper by name. Mixtapes also feature unreleased songs, often “leaked” to the D.J. by a record label that wants to test an artist’s popularity or build hype for a coming album release. Record labels regularly hire mixtape D.J.’s to produce CDs featuring a specific artist. In many cases, these arrangements are conducted with a wink and a nod rather than with a contract; the label doesn’t officially grant the D.J. the right to distribute the artist’s songs or formally allow the artist to record work outside of his contract.

In December, not long before the bust, I spent a week with DJ Drama and the Aphilliates in Atlanta. The D.J.’s are true celebrities in the city’s vibrant hip-hop community. They were seated at the V.I.P. tables at nightclubs and parties and surrounded by fans at strip clubs, which in Atlanta are considered crucial venues for new hip-hop; tracks are often given their first spins while strippers frantically shake their behinds.

Although the music that the Aphilliates promote glorifies violence and drug dealing — one of their trademark Gangsta Grillz sound effects is a few shots fired by a gun with a silencer, followed by the thud of a body dropping — they did not live a gangster lifestyle. (Drama often rose at 8 a.m. to take his oldest daughter to kindergarten at a private school.) Instead, they seemed to be aspiring young music executives with a long-term business plan who had figured out a faster and more lucrative way to make it big than an internship at a record label.

The success of “Gangsta Grillz” had secured for the Aphilliates their own radio shows and record contracts, as well as endorsement deals with Pepsi and clothing companies. When I visited, the Aphilliates were working on an “official” Gangsta Grillz release, to be distributed by Grand Hustle, part of Atlantic Records; Drama said it would use only licensed songs and cleared samples. In September, the Aphilliates signed a partnership deal with Asylum Records, part of Warner Music Group, to distribute albums that Drama and Cannon would produce.

DJ Drama knew that aspects of his business were in what he described to me as “a legal gray area,” and he was secretive about even the most basic facts of how the Aphilliates ran their business. He allowed that he had “got rich” because of his reputation as a mixtape D.J., though he would not even admit to me that he actually sold mixtapes. The line between self-promotion and secrecy was sometimes an awkward one for him to walk, especially as his underground CDs moved further into the mainstream. Several small distributors had begun selling Drama’s CDs, repackaged with scannable barcodes, to major retailers like Best Buy.

One of the CDs confiscated by R.I.A.A. investigators during the Atlanta raid was “Dedication 2,” a mixtape that DJ Drama made with Lil Wayne, a New Orleans rapper; it appeared on the Billboard hip-hop and R&B charts and was widely reviewed in the mainstream press. (Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times chose “Dedication 2” as one of the 10 best recordings of 2006.) As the R.I.A.A. agents boxed up Drama’s stash of “Dedication 2,” the CD continued to sell well at major retailers like Best Buy and FYE (a national chain of record stores) and also at the iTunes Store online.

The local Fox report of the bust was posted on the Internet and widely viewed. The spectacle of men who were known to every hip-hop fan as players in the mainstream music industry being arrested with the aid of the enforcement arm of that same industry was so bizarre and unexpected that a handful of conspiracy theories quickly arose to explain what had happened. Some fans speculated on message boards that the D.J.’s must have been running other illegal businesses on the side. There were others who thought that the bust was payback from a small distributor who had recently sued DJ Drama for violating a contract. But most fans simply thought the men were victims of a music industry that didn’t understand hip-hop. The day after Drama’s arrest, fans circulated on the Internet a stylized image of Drama’s face over a caption that said “Free Drama and Cannon.” Mixunit.com, the biggest Web distributor of mixtapes, removed its entire stock from the site and posted pictures of Drama and Cannon on its main page with the message, “Free the D.J.’s.” A member of the Diplomats, a Harlem hip-hop group, told MTV News that Jan. 16 was “D-day in hip-hop.” Some fans said that in protest they’d never buy another label release; a New York City radio D.J. called record labels the ultimate “snitches.”

Lil Wayne, who made “Dedication 2” with Drama, said in an interview that Drama would have to “play the game fair,” adding that he thought it was unfortunate that sometimes mixtapes outsell an artist’s official label releases, cutting into the artist’s royalties. Soon after, Rapmullet.com, one of the most prominent mixtape Web sites, posted an image of Wayne on its home page over the words: “Is Wayne a traitor? Did he side with the suits? We didn’t abandon Drama — will you? Who’s next to jump ship?”

Drama is the public face of the Aphilliates, but he, Cannon and their third partner, DJ Sense (a k a Brandon Douglas, 26) function as a team; all three are the hosts of a weekly radio show broadcast on WHTA, an Atlanta hip-hop and R&B station, and another Gangsta Grillz show on Sirius satellite radio, and they jointly own the Aphilliates Music Group. The men have been friends since they met at college a decade ago, and they have an easy rhythm with one another, like teammates who play pickup basketball every week and can pass or negotiate a pick without making eye contact. All three wear the collective’s signature neck chain with a diamond-encrusted pendant in the shape of the letter A.

Drama, whose mother is a white education professor and whose father is a black civil rights activist, has expressive brown eyes and a closely trimmed beard. He usually wears a baseball cap backward or propped loosely atop his light brown hair, cocked to the side. Although his workday rarely starts before noon, he comes across as a savvy businessman. Most of the time he doesn’t say much, but it’s clear he is always paying close attention to what is going on around him. When he is in the studio, about to lay down a Gangsta Grillz “drop” (a phrase that is repeated throughout a mixtape), or when he has to tell a bouncer that no, he won’t stand behind that velvet rope, he rocks back and forth, building his energy, then barks out a torrent of speech, after which he seems to retreat back into himself again. He has a quiet, focused energy that can seem gruff; around Sense and Cannon, though, he gets goofy.

Cannon is a huge guy — 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds — with a lumbering gait and a sweet, unguarded smile. He sometimes spends 24 hours at a stretch in the studio, hunched over a mixing board and a computer running Pro Tools, taking breaks to play video games. He loves to shop, and he especially likes to visit high-end Atlanta malls to buy Prada cologne and examine the jewelry. His enormous sneaker collection takes up the bulk of his apartment’s walk-in closet, as well as the trunk of his Chevy Tahoe S.U.V. and most of a storage space he rents by the month.

Sense is known as the visionary with the business ideas, the one who operates mostly behind the scenes. He is short and just a little bit nerdy. Once when we were in the studio at WHTA, a D.J. named Mami Chula wandered in while a song was playing. She gave Sense a look, shook her head and mused aloud, “I just never saw someone with such a small head.” Sense didn’t say anything, just gave her an indignant look. It seemed as if he was accustomed to being teased.

The day after the raid, when Drama and Cannon were each released from jail on $100,000 bonds, they drove straight to the WHTA studios, went on the air and promoted their coming label releases. There’s a video on YouTube that shows the scene: Drama swaggers into the studio in a white T-shirt and a gray zip-up track-suit jacket, his diamond “A” chain swinging across his chest.

The D.J.’s on air were known as the Durrty Boyz, and one of them announced that they had an “exclusive interview to find out what the hell is going on with Gangsta Grillz.” He asked the accused felons to get close to the microphone.

Cannon murmured: “It’s Don Cannon. Holla at me.”

DJ Sense, who also goes by the name Trendsetter, said: “Yeah, yeah, you know what it is. The boy T-t-t-t-t-t-trendsetta! Holla at your boy!”

Drama, who sometimes calls himself “Mr. Thanksgiving” because, he says, he “feeds the whole industry,” said: “Thanksgiving is every year, man. It doesn’t go nowhere. Do you understand what that means? It’s a holiday, it’s every year. . . . It’s not going nowhere. DJ Drama! I am in full effect.”

After the Durrty Boyz spun a Ying Yang Twins song, Drama took calls at a rapid clip, and he responded to nearly every question or message of support with a reminder of the Aphilliates’ coming Gangsta Grillz release on Atlantic.

One female caller, particularly incensed, demanded, “Can I speak to Drama?”

“What’s up?” Drama asked. “What’s good?”

“Drama, what happened? . . . I mean, come on now, you went to jail?”

“I mean, for a quick minute,” Drama replied. “I am home, though.”

“Uh-uh! We ain’t having that. Don Cannon, Trendsetter, do I need to fight somebody?”

“We’re gonna need you,” Drama said. “We’re gonna start a whole campaign. . . . You know the Gangsta Grillz album is coming out, right?”

“Oh, for real?”

In 1996, Sense and Drama, then both freshmen majoring in mass communications, met in Brawley Hall, their dorm at Clark Atlanta University. C.A.U. is part of the country’s largest consortium of historically black colleges, directly abutting Morehouse and Spelman. Drama and Sense were both aspiring D.J.’s, and they were both from Philadelphia. After they met, they competed in a local D.J. battle and became friends. The following year they met Cannon, also a D.J. from Philadelphia (“Aphilliates” combines the Phil of Philadelphia with an A for Atlanta), and the three became inseparable. Each D.J. found his own niche: Sense interned at WHTA, Cannon spun records at college parties and Drama started selling his own mixtapes. Every night in his apartment, Drama made 10 copies of his latest cassette, and the next day he brought them to campus. Between classes, he would set up a cheap yellow boom box on a major promenade at C.A.U. known as the Strip and offer tapes for sale. He also sold tapes at Georgia State, where he would tell customers that the identity of DJ Drama was a mystery. “I’d tell them I never met Drama, I don’t know the guy, I just work for him,” he told me.

In his junior year, in 1998, Drama put together a compilation of Southern hip-hop, which was beginning to emerge nationally as a distinct sound and style. Often called dirty South, it was more dance-oriented and melodic and raunchier than hip-hop from either coast. That mixtape, “Jim Crow Laws,” sold well, and Drama decided to start a Southern series, which he named Gangsta Grillz. Amateur mistakes were made early on — “we actually spelled ‘Grillz’ with an S,” Drama recalled — but the series quickly took off. Through Sense, Drama met a young local rapper named Lil Jon, who had helped invent a frenetic new style of hip-hop known as crunk. Drama asked Lil Jon to be the host of a mixtape, and Jon did a manic series of drops throughout Gangsta Grillz No. 4. It was the first CD that Drama was able to get into stores.

Around the time Drama was hitting his stride, a young entrepreneur named Jason Geter was working as a manager for T.I., then a little-known artist from Atlanta’s Bankhead housing projects signed to an imprint of Arista. Geter wasn’t happy with the label’s marketing of T.I.’s first album, so he undertook his own promotions, independently shooting a video and printing up T-shirts. Geter said that he started seeing Drama’s mixtapes everywhere — in barbershops and record stores. (“Drama was the most consistent guy doing mixtapes in Atlanta,” he told me. “Some of the other people didn’t even have covers for the CDs, but Drama stood out.”) One night Geter called Drama and asked if he could bring T.I. by Drama’s home studio to do some drops and freestyles on a mixtape.

Drama was ecstatic. “At that point, no one was really checking for me,” he told me. “I hadn’t had a call in three months.” After the impromptu recording session, Geter started giving Drama unreleased T.I. songs and eventually asked him to produce and release a whole CD of T.I.’s work. When T.I.’s mixtape “Down With the King” sold well, other managers started taking their artists to Drama’s studio. The first mixtape Drama was paid by a label to produce was “Tha Streetz Iz Watchin,” which Def Jam’s CTE label hired him to make with Young Jeezy in 2004, in order to build up hype for a coming CD. When Jeezy’s official release, “Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101,” came out in 2005, bearing a bonus track from the Drama mixtape, it sold two million copies.

At least once a week last fall, Jason Brown, the 30-year-old promotions director for the Aphilliates, could be found making a circuit of Atlanta with boxes of Drama’s new releases stacked in the back of his Chevy Tahoe. The trip often took as long as nine hours. The Thursday I rode with Brown, he was carrying copies of two mixtapes Drama had recently recorded in the studio with Lil Keke and Lil Boosie, who are popular in their home regions — Louisiana and South Texas, respectively — but have not yet broken out nationally. Brown drove down the parkways and roads of Atlanta’s low-income black suburbs, past a landscape of Waffle Houses, custom rim shops and halal meat stores, stopping in with his wares at flea markets and little mom-and-pop record shops.

At around 3 p.m., we pulled into the parking lot of Backstage Records, a small, tidy shop across the street from the Greenbriar Mall, a locale frequently mentioned in hip-hop lyrics. (Ludacris: “Any charges set against me, chunk it up and stand tall/Next year I’m lookin’ into buyin’ Greenbriar Mall.”) Brown tucked a stack of CDs under each arm and headed into the store. He greeted the owner, a short broad man in his late 20s named Vic XL.

“How many you want?” Brown asked XL, holding out the Keke and Boosie CDs.

“Whoa!” XL said, excited. “Boosie is overdue for a mixtape.” XL told me that Boosie’s major-label release, “Bad Azz,” on Asylum Records, was not selling well, but, he explained, “he’s a hood artist,” so that wasn’t a big surprise.

XL inspected both discs and placed his order: “I’m gonna take five.” As Brown started to count CDs off his pile, XL looked again at the liner notes and reconsidered: “No, 10 each.”

A small record store like Backstage rarely orders more than 10 copies of any CD, and Drama’s distribution system meets XL’s needs better than the mainstream distribution system does. If XL wants just 10 copies of the new Lil Scrappy CD, he can’t buy them directly from the label’s distributors as chains like Best Buy do. Instead, he has to go through a middleman called a one-stop, which charges XL $10.75 for a CD that retails at Best Buy for $9.99.

The economics of mixtapes appeal to XL, and so do their politics; as he sees it, mixtapes undermine the power of major record labels and radio stations. “Most artists can’t afford to get their music on the radio, but an artist has the right to let his fan base hear what he’s done,” XL said. “Who is the label to dictate how to feed the fan base?”

Mixtapes have long played an important role in hip-hop. In the late 1970s, before rap music was ever recorded onto vinyl or played on a radio station, people found out about hip-hop acts through live recordings of D.J. sets from block parties or clubs. Those cassette recordings were duplicated by hand and sold on the street or in record stores, and given free to gypsy-cab drivers in the Bronx as promotional tools. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, mixtapes remained an important subculture. In the last five years, though, they have risen to a more prominent place in the industry and made the most successful D.J.’s rich.

Mixtapes fill a void left by the consolidation of record labels and radio stations. In the mid-1990s, sales of independent hip-hop albums exceeded those from major releases. But those smaller independent labels were bought out by major labels, and in the late ’90s, the last major independent distributor collapsed. This left few routes for unknown hip-hop artists to enter the market; it also made the stakes higher for major labels, which wanted a better return on their investment. As Jeff Chang, author of “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” a history of hip-hop, told me recently, “The whole industry shifted to massive economies of scale, and mixtapes are a natural outgrowth and response to that.”

Mixtape D.J.’s came to be seen as the first tier of promotions for hip-hop artists, a stepping stone to radio play. Labels began aiding and abetting mixtape D.J.’s, sending them separate digital tracks of vocals and beats from songs so they could be easily remixed. They also started sending copies of an artist’s mixtape out to journalists and reviewers along with the official label release. DJ Chuck T, a mixtape D.J. in South Carolina, told me that when label employees send him tracks to include on his mixtapes, they request a copy of the mixtape so that they can show their bosses the track is “getting spin from the street.” He also said record-label promoters want sales figures for his mixtapes so they can chart sales patterns, which they use in marketing their own releases.

Mixtape D.J.’s have effectively absorbed many of the functions of an A&R department, the branch of a record label that traditionally discovers and develops new talent. Ron Stewart, a promotions coordinator at Jive Records, a subsidiary of Sony BMG Music, told me he prefers to test new artists out on mixtapes. “Budget permitting,” he said, “we’d do a few mixtapes with a few D.J.’s, because they have different audiences in different regions.” Labels prefer to use established mixtape D.J.’s like Drama, rather than produce promotional CDs themselves, Stewart said, because “the best D.J.’s have a better brand than the average label does.”

Although the deals are informal and often secret, labels typically pay a prominent D.J. like Drama $10,000 to $15,000 to produce a mixtape for an artist. The label’s representatives, Stewart explained, adopt what amounts to a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about the D.J.’s plans to sell the work; what the D.J. does with his copy of the master, Stewart said, “is his own business.” For successful D.J.’s, mixtape sales can bring considerable revenue. Mixtapes sell for anywhere from $5 to $10 on the street or on a Web site like Mixunit, and overhead is low, since the CDs cost only about 50 cents to manufacture and D.J.’s rarely pay royalties or licensing fees.

Although many hip-hop artists view mixtapes as an essential way to build their careers, some are critical of aspects of the system. One editor of a hip-hop magazine, who would comment only anonymously, told me: “In the aftermath of the raid, talking to artists, the stuff they say when Drama’s not around — there is a little bit of animosity, because he is clearly making money off these artists. They all saw his car being towed off on TV. What was it? A Maserati?”

Killer Mike, an Atlanta rapper who is signed to Sony and who has been featured on a number of DJ Drama’s mixtapes, told me he is not really a “supporter” of mixtapes. “That doesn’t mean I don’t play mixtapes in my car and listen to other peoples’ mixtapes, but as an artist, I feel the amount of rhymes you have to write to put out a mixtape is the same amount you have to for an album,” he said. “I’d rather put out albums over my own beats than use other people’s beats and have a problem later.”

Pimp C, a Texas rapper who is half of the popular underground hip-hop duo UGK, has repeatedly refused to participate in a UGK mixtape despite requests by his record label and, he said, from countless mixtape D.J.’s. Pimp C told me that because there is no paper trail, mixtape D.J.’s are able to invent sales figures, and they routinely claim that, after their overhead, they just break even. But based on his experience producing two of his own mixtapes, Pimp C suspects D.J.’s make plenty; they just don’t want to give artist a cut. “Every time I was approached by a mixtape D.J., they tried to sell me the dream there was no money in it, and it was something artists need to do to help their album sales,” he said. “But I know how much bread can be made. . . . If you’re making money, chop it up with me.”

Before DJ Drama went to jail, no mixtape D.J. had been the target of a major raid; busts had been directed at small retailers, like Mondo Kim’s in New York’s East Village. Jonathan Lamy, a spokesperson for the R.I.A.A., said the raid on Drama’s studio represented no official change in policy and had been undertaken only at the behest of Atlanta law enforcement. But for many in the industry, the focus on a single prominent figure seemed like no accident. “Arresting them criminally under RICO was firing a warning shot at anyone who has mixtapes,” said Walter McDonough, a copyright lawyer who has negotiated with the R.I.A.A. on behalf of Jay-Z.

Others pointed to the selective nature of the crackdown as evidence that the raid was a deliberate effort — major retailers like Best Buy were not raided, even though they carry many of the same CDs Drama was arrested for selling. The R.I.A.A. “would have to know nothing about the industry they are monitoring not to realize this stuff is all over Best Buy and FYE,” says Eric Steuer, the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit that works to develop more flexible copyright arrangements for artists and producers. “Maybe they leave them alone because the major chains have promotion deals with record labels.”

Ted Cohen, a former executive at EMI Records who now runs a music-consulting business, told me that the raid was typical of the music industry’s “schizophrenic” approach to promotions; a label’s marketing department wants to get its artists’ songs in front of as many people as possible, even if it means allowing or ignoring free downloads or unlicensed videos on YouTube. But the business department wants to collect royalties. “It is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” Cohen said.

Drama’s arrest shook up mixtape D.J.’s and promoters across the country. But even in the days immediately following the raid, D.J.’s continued to release tapes — some with hastily added tracks on which rappers cursed the R.I.A.A. — and major labels continued to e-mail them new tracks. Some in the industry speculated that things would have to change, that mixtapes would either move further underground or become legitimate licensed products. But no one I spoke with thought the arrest would permanently damage Drama’s career. In fact, Julia Beverly, the editor of Ozone, a Southern hip-hop magazine, suggested that it was more likely to improve his image and album sales. “Really, this takes him to a gangsta level,” she said. “It gives him a little something extra. It’s messed up, but if someone goes to jail or dies, it elevates his status and just makes him more of a star than he was before. That’s the way the entertainment industry works in general. So, having cops at your door with M-16’s at your head, and MTV News reporting on the raid, calling you the biggest D.J. in the world? You can’t pay for that type of look.”

Samantha M. Shapiro is a contributing writer.