Cherry Chocolate Rain

I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” over the last few weeks to get a better understanding of the issue of corporate dominance over public life. Klein writes about the way big, branded businesses have replaced the town square and the library with the big box mall and the chain bookstore. This concern about the robbing of public space from the public and replacing it with controlled, private space is mirrored in Lawrence Lessig’s books “Free Culture” and “The Future of Ideas”. Lessig is concerned about issues such as Net Neutrality, a cause which has arisen out of the fear that telecommunications companies would seek to control access to certain parts of the internet.

To Lessig, the internet represents an amazing tool for independent content creation and dissemination, freed from the costs (and loss of creative control) associated with dealing with giant media companies to get one’s work published. Add to this the critique from groups like Adbusters and it’s easy to see that a synthesis of Klein and Lessig’s work would have to include a concern that the work generated on the internet could be co-opted by large corporations. There was a recent case in the US regarding Virgin using a photo from Flickr (licensed under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license) without abiding by the terms under which it was licensed. Clearly, big business stands to save a lot of money by searching for content on the internet rather than paying a photographer to take a commissioned shot.

Tay Zonday, author of the famous (on the internet) song “Chocolate Rain” is now a shill for Dr Pepper, as can be seen in the following video:

Now, Zonday is certainly allowed to collaborate with Dr Pepper in an ad campaign using his song, it’s one of his many rights as an artist. What makes me uncomfortable is the co-optation of an internet phenomenon to sell a product. I don’t doubt that Dr Pepper’s ad gurus would have heard of the video clip and its fame and they have seen the potential to tap in to this common cultural experience to sell soft drink. The internet, being what it is, has spawned countless covers, parodies, satires and other reinterpretations of Zonday’s work. Should Zonday sign the rights to his original “Chocolate Rain” over to a corporation, what would happen to those internet users who have contrinbuted to Chocolate Rain’s fame through their reinterpretation?

Anyone with a modern computer and some form of video camera or webcam can make a video and upload it to YouTube or Google Video. As Tay Zonday has shown us, anyone on the internet can make some serious money by creating a fad or meme. Commercial co-option of this unbridled, community-based, low cost culture threatens to put that very culture at risk.

We’ve already seen cases like Napster, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy and BitTorrent where a bunch of people on the internet have come up with an idea to capture the technological potential of the internet to shift data more efficiently. Recently, mash-ups have come under the scrutiny of media companies seeking to protect their copyrights as more skilled computer users remix elements of different songs into something new which can sound radically different to all the source materials. Rather than embracing this new shift in the way society deals with intellectual property, the media interests have sought to enshrine protection of their business model in copyright law. US and Australian law make no attempt to understand the changes happening to our culture as a result of the internet. Copyright and intellectual property law needs a massive overhaul, possibly even a rewrite, or else the internet’s creativity will be stifled and the content that is generated will end up making media companies even richer.