Copying machines

Abstract

Although there is a large body of scholarly literature on musical copyright, very little of this work explores in a sustained and direct way the role of copyright in regulating musical memory. This paper conceptualizes sound recording as a mnemonic technology and analyzes the manner in which copyright law attempts to manage the impact of this technology on legal concepts of musical memory and authorial subjectivity. The paper analyzes the case law on “cryptomnesia” or unconscious plagiarism in the United States and Canada wherein defendants claimed not to have access to the original work and therefore could not have copied it. These contested similarities highlight the dispersion of memory and creativity across a heterogeneous network that includes composers, musicians, and producers but also institutions and machines, and leads to the present difficulty of recentering the authorial subject in legal discourses and practices. In this way, late twentieth century legal disputes over unconscious plagiarism anticipate contemporary anxieties about the entanglement of creative and consumer subjectivities with digital techniques in recent litigation campaigns against mash-up remixing, peer-to-peer file sharing, and other popular practices of online music reproduction. Then as now, copyright acts as a site for disciplining and normalising certain modes of listening to and remembering sound recordings which in turn help smooth over tensions in the field of capitalist music (re)production.