I was listening to NPR tonight when I heard their report entitled “When Fair Use Isn’t Fair.” The segment looks into the legality of remixes, and cites not only The Daily Show, but a video mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight.
The mashup was made by Jonathan McIntosh, who describes himself as a pop culture hacker. Here’s what he says about his video, “Buffy vs. Edward”:
In this remixed narrative Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Sunnydale High. It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21st century.”
This piqued my interest for several reasons. First, I recently finished watching all seven seasons of Buffy, and I’ve been having an ongoing discussion with my husband about its pro-feminism overtones. And, in the spirit of full confession, I have read all four books in the Twilight series and watched the first movie (no judging, we all have our moments of shame). So I enjoyed seeing what McIntosh did with his remix, which sharply contrasts not only the characters and gender roles in the source materials, but also the levels of writing and acting.
Second, while I can’t say I understand copyright and fair use fully, I find remixing and issues of digital authorship intriguing. In the NPR piece, McIntosh says, “Our culture is moving more and more into an audio-visual language. And so the question is: Do we get to speak in that audio-visual language or not?”
That was the question posed to the Library of Congress US Copyright Office regarding exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act last year. The proceedings have yet to be finalized, but the question of what constitutes fair use is one that needs to be revisited as technology and mediums change. As a writer who uses the digital space, I want to be creative with technology and its language. But in order to do that, I need to know the limitations. Just like Jonathan McIntosh.
