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Along with Tony Falzone and others out at Stanford, I wrote an amicus brief in the pending Salinger/60 Years Later case, on behalf of the American Library Association, the Organization for Transformative Works, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Right to Write Fund. Tony discusses the issues here; he is focused on the standard for preliminary injunctive relief, which is quite important, but I am even more concerned with the cramped definition of transformativeness adopted by the district court. I hope both will be addressed on appeal.
The section of the brief covering transformativeness draws on Blanch v. Koons (see William Patry's blog post, full text of 2nd Circuit decision). One of the interesting things to me about that decision is how the finding in favor of transformative use relies heavily on artist Jeff Koons' own account of his purpose, as stated in an affidavit, in making an artwork that included part of an image appropriated from a fashion spread by photographer Andrea Blanch. This seems to put an enormous amount of weight on the artist's own self-proclaimed, after-the-fact intentions. In an earlier post on the district court decision, Patry acerbically commented:
One need not pay the slightest attention to Koons' representations about what he set out to do to see that "Niagara" uses the work in a transformative manner. Indeed, not paying any attention to what Koons says has two signal values: (1) from a legal standpoint, one cannot as easily get enmeshed in debates about judges judging art: you merely look at his work to see if it is, objectively, transformative. I think Blanch was a transformative use and Puppies not. Second, by ignoring Koons's remarks, one also avoids paying him the slightest attention, thereby avoiding feeding into the very source of his "art": attention.
Everyone seems to agree that judges shouldn't play the role of art or literary critics. In the words of the brief for the Salinger case, "Courts have recognized that fair use must not depend on a single judge’s perception of an artist’s merit but rather on the possibility that a reasonable member of society could perceive the transformative use."
But who are these reasonable members of society? The phrase seems to imply laypersons rather than experts and critics -- the kind of people that Patry suggests could "merely look at [the artist's] work to see if it is, objectively, transformative." I almost get the sense that reasonableness is construed as the opposite of expertise. If it's only those highfalutin' experts with their five-dollar words that can discern a work's transformativeness (and you know those art and literary critic types -- they'll happily argue that up is down and right is wrong if you give them a podium), what's a poor judge, trained only to the law, to do? So a reasonable perception of transformative use is one that your typical judge could at least conceive of, or -- if proposed by, say, the defense in a copyright case -- deem plausible, without special recourse to critical theory or specialized discourse.
So where would this leave subcultural transformative works that rely on community-specific knowledge for legibility? How many "reasonable members of society" outside of specific fan cultures could perceive the transformative nature of vids? If certain kinds of subcultural works require their own forms of subcultural expertise to generate meaning and response amongst their subcultural audiences, how will courts navigate fair use claims? Should courts be predisposed to give greater deference to fair use claims for subcultural appropriations and transformations of mainstream sources? Have they in the past?
Comments
This makes me idly wonder whether there is a greater connection between these two subjects in law, between obscenity and copyright, sexual desire and ownership. Obviously there's metaphorical and societal connection between these subjects in general, but I wonder whether they function together somehow within the workings of the law. When I make free, wanton, improper use of copyrighted material to make a vid - use it in a way not intended by its creators - am I not metaphorically and legally aligned with those who take sexual pleasure in a manner not intended by The Creator, by which I mean, queer and nonreproductive sexual activity? After all, the overwhelming majority of obscenity cases these days (and throughout history) are brought against works depicting non-normative sexualites; LGBT bookstores get harassed for shipping books on that subject, and other targets include kink publications/porn. And this makes me think of Barbara Johnson's "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and the Law," though I haven't quite got the connections right in my head.
In the comments to the LJ version of this post,
Though that wasn't necessarily always the case (e.g. Walt Disney v. The Air Pirates), so the relationship is probably more complex and contingent.
ETA: Thanks for mentioning the Barbara Johnson essay -- I'll check it out.
Edited 2009-08-04 09:06 pm (UTC)
Well, copyright and obscenity are two areas where the law gets to decide whether expression should be censored. If anything, I would think law regarding copyright had more in common with libel/slander than obscenity, censorship regarding obscenity surely has more to do with supposed damage to the community than with specific individuals claiming their reputation (or income) has been damaged by propagation of a work that wouldn't cause offense to anyone else.