About the project
The project MASHED: Mashup Music, Copyright, and Platform Regulation will use the relationship between the contemporary mashup music scene and Internet platforms’ algorithmic platform regulations as a lens through which to investigate the tensions and feedback mechanisms between the incentives of copyright law and the purposes of artistic adaptations.
WP1 will examine the specific underlying aesthetic principles and values that have emerged within the mashup scene and explore how these principles resonate with various notions of musical value and originality, and, more broadly, authorship and ownership.
WP2 will examine the tensions and feedback mechanisms that have emerged between the international Internet-based mashup music scene and localized legal systems, and the ways in which mashups can be understood in terms of the transnational but also localized legal concepts of transformative use, parody, criticism, and quotation. WP3 will critically assess the algorithmic regulatory systems of user-generated online platforms and their impact on mashup producers and mashup aesthetics.
Objectives
Combining expertise in, and methodologies from, musicology, law, and sociology, the project seeks
- to unpack the important consequences of divergent understandings of how to protect the larger political principle of freedom of expression
- to develop a timely and novel theoretical framework for understanding the complexities of authorship and ownership, including the various ways in which these concepts are understood and operationalized in contemporary society