Remix’s retreat? Content moderation, copyright law and mashup music

Abstract

Many online media platforms currently utilise algorithmically driven content moderation to prevent copyright infringement. This article explores content moderation’s effect on mashup music – a form of remix which relies primarily on the unauthorised combining of pre-existing, recognisable recordings. Drawing on interviews ( n = 30) and an online survey ( n = 92) with mashup producers, we show that content moderation affects producers’ creative decisions and distribution strategies, and has a strong negative effect on their overall motivation to create mashups. The objections that producers hold to this state of affairs often strongly resonate with current copyright exceptions. However, we argue that these exceptions, which form a legal ‘grey zone’, are currently unsatisfactorily accommodated for by platforms. Platforms’ political-economic power allows them, in effect, to ‘occupy’ and control this zone. Consequently, the practical efficacy of copyright law’s exceptions in this setting is significantly reduced.

Harmonizing the Cacophony with MIC: An Affordance-aware Framework for Platform Moderation

“…On Spotify, all audio-content can be moderated, since audio must be first uploaded to the platform and processed before it is hosted publicly. Spotify has mechanisms for algorithmic content moderation, 14 and the existence of such mechanisms leads us to believe that all audio-content is moderated in some way. In this way, Spotify's moderation purview seems 15 universal.…”

“…There is a decent amount of research done on audio-specific platforms that fall outside the scope of traditional SNS moderation research. For instance, Spotify uses music recommendations [58], discovery [8], and curation mechanisms [14,40] as implicit forms of moderation.…”

“…This is the case with moderating copyright-abiding content[14] 15. Since we do not know the inner workings of Spotify's design, we cannot claim this with absolute certainty.…”

Mashup music as expression displaced and expression foregone

“…4. A separate article by my colleagues provides full results and methodology of this empirical research (Brøvig-Hanssen & Jones, 2021). See the MASHED project website for our full survey, the interview template, and a more detailed description of our method: https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/projects/mashed/mashupscopyright/.…”