I was ambling the streets of upper Manhattan last week when I passed an Asian woman dressed in black and wearing a porkpie hat. I had just come from Strawberry Fields, the Central Park memorial dedicated by Yoko Ono to the memory of her husband John Lennon. So it seemed serendipitous to encounter the lady herself.
Although the 78-year-old New Yorker doesnt know me from a hole in the ground, there have been some minor legal issues between us. Stephen Harper is involved, too.
You may remember back in March of this year when our rockin Prime Monster warbled John Lennons Imagine at a campaign stop, alongside the 10-year-old Internet singing sensation Maria Aragon. Harpers handlers had co-opted a little girl and the memory of a longhaired peacenik in their ongoing effort to humanize their wooden leader. All that was missing from the touching tableaux was a kitten, a ball of yarn and a sad clown.
The clip was posted to a Tory election website and then onto YouTube. The trouble is, Ono owns the rights to her late husbands work as a solo performer. The legal eagles at her publishing firm Lenono Music, always on the lookout for copyright infringement, discovered Harpos performance and were not impressed. It disappeared off the web in short order.
By that time, I had my own parody of Harpers performance up on YouTube. In the original, he prefaces Imagine by saying, Ive got my own lyrics for this, that might cause a bit of controversy. I clipped that part of the video and then reimagined Harpers own lyrics. (Imagine theres no health care, its easy if you try ) The lyrics scrolled over a black background, with a soundtrack cribbed from a piano teachers YouTube demonstration of Imagine. (The social networking site allows users to reuse and alter material posted by other users).
I ended up doing two versions, both of which netted some press attention and a modest number of hits. Soon both went black, with the message; this video has been removed due to a copyright claim by Lenono Music. That was two strikes against me, I learned. One more and Id be out, my account suspended and my remaining videos disappeared down the digital memory hole. Before I could access my account again I had to attend the social networking sites copyright school. I watched a three-minute cartoon featuring a content-filching cat in a pirate hat, and answered some skill-testing questions.
Its not like I was paying for my YouTube membership, but I wasnt profiting financially from my slapdash videos either. In North American copyright law, there has been a tradition of recognizing fair use, and turning a blind eye to alteration of published material for satirical purposes. Hence the parodies of corporate brands and services, from Mad magazine to Saturday Night Live to digital yuk factories like the Onion. My version of Imagine was so far removed from the original there was only a skeletal melody line remaining. It appeared that Lenono Music wasnt into such fine distinctions, however.
Corporate clampdowns on all intellectual property serve culture no better than filesharing free-for-alls. And contested terrain between these two polesinvolving remixes, mashups and parodiesgets more rubbery all the time.
In the days after the Dec. 8, 1980 assassination of Lennon, thousands of people gathered in the winter cold of New Yorks Central Park and sang his songs up to the windows of the Dakota, where Ono sat grieving. I couldnt find any clips of these scenes on YouTube, but any floating around online would also be in violation of copyright lawat least according to Lenono Musics yardstick for intellectual property.
Still, Ono is OK by me. She has allowed the use of her late husbands material for human rights causes while refusing to lease anything for corporate branding campaigns. Thanks to her, there are no commercials employing Instant Karma for instant coffee, Watching the Wheels for SUVs, or Whatever Gets You Through the Night for sleep medication. All things considered, losing my modest parody of Harpers performance was nothing if it means the Tories have to lay off Lennons catalogue. Anything that deters the Prime Monster from singing pop songs is a blow against bad taste from a neoconservative crooner.
www.geoffolson.com
