Implications

At the heart of the issue lies ‘appropriation art’. Think collage. Many artists today work with a contemporary palette that takes from, reproduces, or appropriates material found within popular culture: film, tv, radio, advertising, news, text, character, song, plot…and so on. Artists transform what they have appropriated into new works, with new interpretations and new meanings. Artists use this source material because it is meaningful. They use it because it holds and reflects popular, cultural or civic memory; because it conjures personal associations or connects us in a profound way. These works tell us new stories while reminding us of the old ones. They question, push boundaries, advance technologies. We cannot open a book on art history without being presented with appropriation in some form. The medium encourages experimentation and invention. But in this experimentation and invention, copyright finds a problem.

The issue is this: in experimenting and pushing boundaries, in pulling cultural sources together so they can comment, artists appropriate and ‘copy’, and frequently do so in quantities and qualities that run afoul of copyright law. Exceptions that could potentially protect this form of creativity are too narrow to offer artists certainty. As a result, artists working with appropriation do so under a blanket of apprehension and misapprehension. The balance has tipped: laws originally intended to protect now prevent. The bitter irony is that artists who use appropriation have received Canada’s highest awards, their work has been recognised internationally. Descriptions of works using appropriation occupy pages of art journals and are cited and taught in classrooms everywhere. To cite just a single example: a young Canadian artist working with appropriation installs a body of his work in the world’s largest gallery as this goes to press. Meanwhile a glossy government pamphlet entitled ‘Canada at a Glance’ is put out to rightfully boost Canada’s international reputation in the arts. We find in listed amongst the artists the names of at least three who practice ‘appropriation art’. The pamphlet describes how Canada encourages a ’spirit of stimulating questioning’. It describes how new technologies have ‘opened up other channels of artistic expression’. This then is ‘appropriation art’.

And it is an accelerating problem. A strong movement over the last few years has promoted a particularly narrow view of copyright law for artists. Copyright is becoming stricter and more complicated. Many cherished works in art history would be mouldering in barns if produced under current restrictive copyright laws. Proposals for new, expanded copyright laws to address digital technology are even more restrictive.
New forms of appropriation art are being extinguished even before their potential is recognized.

This narrow view of copyright is based on the false premise that creators need an ever-greater degree of control over their creations. The truth is that fair access to copyrighted material lies at the heart of copyright law. The law grants copyright owners limited rights over their works but balanced against those rights are the rights of those who follow. Access – fair access – also encourages creation.

Artists should enjoy the support of the law, and not have to work under conditions of uncertainty. Works using appropriation do not compete financially with the films from which they borrow, the songs from which they sample, the textual bits they frame. The value of these works of art does not negatively affect the source material in any financial way. If anything, new works encourage and stimulate new use, new access, new interest, new connections. And contemporary culture should not be immune from critical commentary. Without this work our cultural environment would be much the poorer, and glossy pamphlets describing the benefits of contemporary Canadian Heritage would lose much of their content.

Canadian policy on copyright is at a critical juncture. We have the chance to re-examine our cultural laws in a thoughtful way. But if we do not understand or recognize the critical issues, if we do not accept that excessive copyright laws are increasingly stifling creativity, then we risk closing a door on a vibrant cultural future.