Aram Sinnreich

ETHICS RECONFIGURED: How today's media consumers evaluate the role of creative reappropriation

In recent years, ‘configurable’ technologies such as the Internet-connected PC, cheap and accessible media-editing software, and writeable media drives have enabled a profound shift in the agency of media consumers, opening up a vast grey area between traditional production and consumption. This shift has given rise to a host of new media practices and products, such as mash-ups, remixes, mods, and machinima. However, the cultural discourse about media practices are still mired in the ‘black and white’ ethics of the twentieth century media distribution, evidenced by ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’ debates. In this paper, we examine the self-reported attitudes of nearly 1,800 American adults and draw on the personal interviews with dozens of configurable music practitioners to discover what a new, and more appropriate, ethical discourse of configurability might look like. Data suggest that the new practices of cultural appropriation are both reaffirming and challenging the age-old evaluative criteria.

The Hidden Demography of New Media Ethics

The early years of the twenty-first century have been characterized by an explosion of new ‘configurable’ cultural forms and practices, such as mashups, remixes and machinima, enabled by rapidly proliferating global digital network technologies. These new cultural forms blur the distinctions between traditional production and consumption and have come increasingly into contrast with the letter of copyright law. In the absence of functionally relevant economic and legal frameworks, communities around the globe have developed their own ethical criteria to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate configurable practices. In the present article, the authors share data from surveys fielded in 2006 and 2010, suggesting that as these practices have become more prevalent, the ethical frameworks people employ to make sense of them have continued to proliferate and mature. Finally, we analyze the demographic profiles of respondents applying each ethical framework, revealing hidden national, class and ethnic distinctions underpinning the disparate value systems that have been employed to make sense of these new practices.

Copyright Givers and Takers: Mutuality, Altruism and Instrumentalism in Open Licensing

Over the past three decades, open licensing has evolved from hacker culture thought experiment to a transformative force in applied copyright across a range of industries. Yet very little empirical research exists to understand its disparate uses. This article examines social practices and attitudes about open licensing in order to examine the practical experience of creators and consumers who use this tool and in order to assess its value in moderating the negative consequences of extensive copyright. The discussion about the role of open licensing in creative industries and communities tends to be polarized into two vantage points. Either (1) it is a new, altruistic paradigm enabling creative communities to rework copyright to fit their vision for the cultural commons, or (2) it is a radical theft of creative labor, encouraged by Google and other digital industrial powerhouses, to cheat creators out of their share of profits. Both of these rhetorical vantage points presume a monolithic and largely either selfless or unaware base of creative laborers. We analyze data from a series of surveys across a range of creative fields and practices to show that creators employ open licensing for a variety of reasons, including instrumental purposes oriented toward skirting the many impediments created by institutions and law, rather than merely because they are unaware or selfless.