Tone Glow 200: Negativland

An interview with plunderphonic legends Negativland about copyright, fair use, the rise of AI, and yes, that thing with U2

Negativland

Photo Credit: Negativland and Jennifer Bennett

Negativland is a multimedia collective that has been producing music, videos, books, radio, and live performances since 1980. Their list of accomplishments is long: they coined the term “culture jamming,” became embroiled in a media hoax surrounding an axe murder, and perhaps most famously, were sued by U2 after releasing a parodic single called U2. Since that event, Negativland have become vocal proponents of fair use, advocating for the right to sample, re-use, and appropriate art. In their storied career, Negativland have recorded 15 albums, including Escape from Noise (1987), Helter Stupid (1989), Dispepsi (1997), Thigmotactic (2008), and True False (2019). Their most recent release is Speech Free: Recording Music for Film, Radio, Internet and Television. Ryan Worsley has also recently released a documentary about the band, Stand By For Failure (2022).

Matthew Blackwell interviewed Mark Hosler and Jon Leidecker via Zoom on October 23, 2024 as research for his book Plunderphonics, which was released on November 13 via Bloomsbury. Hosler has been a core member of Negativland since its beginnings in the suburbs east of San Francisco in 1978. Leidecker, who also records as Wobbly, has long been in Negativland’s orbit but officially joined the band in 2010. Below, they tell behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the U2 lawsuit, discuss the changes to copyright and sampling since the ’90s, and try to wrap their heads around how their fair use argument has been twisted in the AI era.

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Matthew Blackwell: Hello!

Mark Hosler: Hi, can you hear me?

I can, yes.

Mark Hosler: Good. Do you go by Matthew or Matt?

Oh, Matthew is fine.

Mark Hosler: Okay, and where are you?

I’m actually in the Canary Islands in Spain.

Mark Hosler: Jeez, so, wait, what season is it—you have the same seasons there as here, right?

Yeah, it’s still north of the equator, so same seasons, but it’s basically summer weather all year round here.

Mark Hosler: And then do you get hurricanes and destruction as well, or? [Note: Hosler lives in Marshall, North Carolina, which had experienced extensive damage due to Hurricane Helene at the time of the interview.]

Thankfully no, it’s up near Africa, off the coast of Morocco near Spain, so hurricanes don’t ever turn that way.

Mark Hosler: I’m in the mountains of North Carolina. It’s fall here, and we’re having unusually warm weather, and today the volunteer station in town where I’ve been going to help out with the destruction is closed. They decided to give everyone a break for a couple days. They’ve been going nonstop for like three weeks now.

Well, thank you for doing this amid all the, I mean…

Mark Hosler: Yeah, it’s really weird. I mean, I can juggle many things at once, but it really weighs on me. I’m friends or acquaintances with—my little town is only 800 people. It’s just like a mile long and two blocks wide. It’s along a river, and that’s what wiped it out. But I’ve lived here 20 years, so I’m friends with everyone. I know every building that’s been renovated downtown, which is pretty much all of them since I got here. I know the people who did the work, who owned them. I know the business owners, the shop owners. I know the employees, everybody. And so the impact feels very personal. It’s just horrifying what everyone’s dealing with.

My home’s fine, I’m okay. I wouldn’t even know anything had happened at all. If you look out, just look down my little ravine here (Hosler points his camera towards a beautifully wooded area). But it’s gonna change life here forever for many people, and I do have friends who’ve lost everything, literally—all they have left is the shirt on their back.

Oh, wow.

Mark Hosler: You know, their home was just destroyed and they’ve lost everything or they’ve lost their buildings, their businesses. So it’s intense, but it’s also the new normal, you know, with climate change. This is happening more and more all over the world. (Jon Leidecker joins the call). Oh, here’s Jon.

Hello, Jon.

Jon Leidecker: Hey.

Mark Hosler: And who have you talked to so far [about the Plunderphonics book]? Anybody?

I’ve talked to John Oswald. I talked to him a couple of years ago, and then recently we’ve emailed back and forth.

Mark Hosler: John is a great friend of ours, and of course we worked hard to convince him to reissue Plunderphonics on our record label, that expanded reissue with the book is one of the things, up there with the Firesign Theatre project, one of the two things I’m most proud of that we’ve managed to get out into the world through our little record label. With John, I just kept saying, “You can do anything you want. We’re not worried about being sued. Do your vision, do your thing.” And he made that double CD release, which I think is historically a really important record.

I’m going to ask you later why you haven’t been sued again, so we’ll circle back around to that.

Mark Hosler: There’s an answer to that!

And then after that, I’m going to ask why Girl Talk hasn’t been sued, and it might be the same answer.

Jon Leidecker: It’s the same answer (laughter).

Mark Hosler: But Jon and I were actually just talking about that very thing, about Girl Talk, when we were driving in the van. What’s interesting is that it’s a different conversation now, all these years later, than it was when we were in the thick of it. It was very different for us all through the ’90s than it became later on.

Jon Leidecker: Yeah, it’s inverted. The arguments have inverted.

Mark Hosler: Now with what’s happened with AI and what’s his fuck face, Sam Altman, Jesus Christ, it’s all been totally flipped on its head and our arguments are now being used by giant bazillionaire-funded corporations. It’s all been flipped on its head, you know? Jon and I’ve been talking about it in the Q&A’s we’ve been doing with these recent shows, because we’re appearing with Ryan Worsley’s documentary about Negativland. So we’re frequently talking about this stuff and our current take on it, because it’s different, the world has changed. As Jon said, it has all inverted in a way that, for me personally, is like a super mindfuck—trying to get our heads around what’s going on and how we should articulate this, both to ourselves, and then to the public who maybe look to us as someone who is going to have an opinion on it.

Well, let’s go chronologically and start with your very tempting tidbit [mentioned in an email] about details of the U2 debacle that were not in your book [Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2].

Mark Hosler: Just a few little anecdotes that I think may be germane to your story. We eventually—and I don’t need to go into the details—but through some detective work and going to certain record stores, I tracked down the actual store where the record was purchased that was used in the lawsuit. It was a store in Athens, Georgia called Wuxtry. The part of the story we were always missing was how did Island Records sue us within 10 days of the record coming out? So it turns out that this independent record store in Athens, Georgia was carrying it. The day it came out, the manager of R.E.M., Bertis Downs, walked into the store and saw it.

He’s friends with U2 and with U2’s manager, or at the time manager, Paul McGuinness. So Bertis bought it, got on the phone with Paul, and because Achtung Baby was about to come out, they were just like, “What?” They went ballistic and Paul had Bertis overnight the record to Dublin.

The reason our record came out a month before Achtung Baby was just complete chance. It was that SST kept delaying the release. I think it was delayed about nine months from when it was supposed to come out. So just by sheer, incredible, and in my view, good fortune, it came out looking like it was the single put out in advance of a new album. Anyway, U2’s manager got it, and when he got it, he sent it to Eric Levine, the VP of business affairs for Island Records in New York City. And he just said, “Stop this, crush it.”

The stories we were hearing from U2’s camp were that [the members themselves] had nothing to do with the lawsuit. Either the members of U2 were lying or, as Bertis told me when I met him years later, their manager often did things without even telling them. So it’s also possible that their manager was lying to them, which I’m kind of inclined to believe. When I listened back to that interview with The Edge, it just doesn’t sound like a guy who’s lying to me. I feel like their manager didn’t tell him stuff. [Note: Hosler and fellow Negativland member Don Joyce posed as journalists for Mondo 2000 magazine in order to interview The Edge].

Years later, when I did have a kind of confrontation with Bertis Downs in the middle of a lecture I was doing at Duke University, it ended up working out very sweetly. He’s a really nice guy and he genuinely felt bad for what had happened to us. He invited me to speak at his music business class where he was teaching at the time at the University of Athens in Georgia. He bought a copy of the Fair Use book and asked me to sign it to him. And so I signed it, “Dear Bertis, thanks for all the good times.” (laughter).

Jon Leidecker: So your theory is that Paul McGuinness went rogue.

Mark Hosler: That’s my theory, yeah. Basically, Bertis gave me a little of the inside story on how U2 and their manager worked as an entity. He said that in the case of R.E.M., “If you made a record that said ’R.E.M.’ in giant letters and ’Negativland’ in little letters at the bottom, we would have talked about it at a band meeting. I would never decide anything without the band’s input.” Also, the members of R.E.M. are savvy enough about art that they wouldn’t have done anything. I’ve subsequently had conversations with Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, and a pretty long conversation with Peter Buck, about all this stuff that happened. So anyway, there’s that story, which may or may not be of interest to how you tell your story.

I’ll definitely include that because it is a missing piece. I’ve read the lawsuit [between Island/Warner Chappell and Negativland/SST] that says the record was bought in Athens, Georgia. It seemed like an odd detail to include.

Mark Hosler: Well, that’s how I figured it out, is that I thought, “How many record stores in Athens, Georgia would sell our record?” And really there was only one. So I went to that store and, as it happened, the guy behind the counter—and this is years and years later—he was the guy. He said, “I’m the guy who sold the record to R.E.M.’s manager.” Just by sheer luck, I ended up talking to the actual dude. Another great story I heard was, someone came up at one of our shows and said, “I was in the store just before Bertis Downs. I was going to buy the one copy they had, but I didn’t have money. I went home to get the cash and when I came back, the guy behind the counter said, ‘Oh, sorry, I just sold it to R.E.M.’s manager.’” That, to me, was funny because if he just had 10 bucks in his pocket, who knows, our lives could have been completely different (laughter).

Right, right, right.

Mark Hosler: There you go. I think Jon’s heard me tell all this stuff, so I apologize to Jon.

Jon Leidecker: The world is 150 people.

Let’s skip ahead a teensy bit. So after all the U2 stuff, did copyright activism become Negativland’s raison d’etre? Or was it something that you were interested in beforehand but it only got amplified by the U2 fiasco?

Mark Hosler: And again, I’m apologizing because to answer these early questions, it’s going to be me talking more than Jon.

Jon Leidecker: No, no, no. I’m expecting that. A lot of this has to be first person and Mark was the one who was there.

Mark Hosler: We initially started creating stuff in 1978 and the first record came out in 1980. The U2 record came out in 1991. There’s a certain level where we never talked about what we were doing. We just did it. We were interested in using things and taking and appropriating them and reusing them, but we were not sitting around talking about the legal issues. We just had an understanding like, “This is interesting, and it’s interesting because we know you’re not supposed to do it.” That becomes exactly why it’s interesting to do: Why are you not supposed to do this? But we didn’t do any deep dives into the law or anything. It was only when we were crushed by Island Records and Polygram, U2’s music publisher, that we were propelled into really looking at the history of it in art and in law.

Don Joyce is the one person in the group who actually—he has two master’s degrees in art—so he really knew the history of art and appropriation going back to Dada and the turn of the century. Then Chris Grigg, who was a hugely important part of the group at that time, did a lot of research on the actual laws and legal things that were going on historically and concurrently with us. What I brought to the table was that I was like, I’m outraged at the injustice of it because you’ve taken our baby, you know? It really felt as if we’d been handed our mission from God: “You guys in Negativland, you may not want to be the people who have to speak out about it, but that’s now your job.” Because we’d been sued on behalf of the largest rock band on the planet earth, and because we’d been through the axe murder hoax, we had this real-life experience of seeing how the news media can be drawn to a story because of some salacious aspect. So we thought that if we play this right, we will get publicity. We’d really been handed a gift and it was an incredible opportunity to speak about it from the point of view of art and culture and not the point of view of the money people, the managers, the lawyers.

Then as things evolved more and got more crazy, things fell apart between us and SST Records. We ended up realizing that part of the way we could tell our story was to literally use the press releases, the faxes, the lawsuit itself, the phone calls. We could actually make a collage narrative, like an epistolary novel out of all this. It would allow people to draw their own conclusions. It would be an example of what it was about. We also thought it would be very respectful of the people reading it because they’re going to figure out for themselves what they think. We didn’t expect to be sued for putting out the magazine that was about being sued for putting out the U2 record! (laughter). So when that happened, that’s what turned it into a five-year-long odyssey. In the end, of course, we ended up publishing a book [the aforementioned Fair Use] where the second half of the book is the aftermath of putting out the magazine and how crazy things got.

The other thing that helped a lot, and this is a story that we only revealed after she died, is that I got a phone call to the Negativland phone number from Sinead O’Connor’s publicist. Sinead O’Connor was following our story and had instructed her publicist to call us. I think she very smartly realized we were struggling to get the word out. The publicist said, “Would you like to have Sinead O’Connor’s press list for the entire world, for you to get to the media?” That’s how we ended up getting into the Washington Post, the London Times, the Irish Times, Rolling Stone. That was like the magic key to the world, to the story becoming a national and international news story in the music press. That’s what gave the story legs in a way that ultimately drove U2 and their people crazy enough that they finally started engaging with us.

But I think it took years and years for them to finally realize we were never going to stop bugging the shit out of them and we were never going to stop trying to get our record back. That’s why you see those letters at the very end of the book, where we kind of, quote, “threaten” them. The big “Aha!” moment we had was when there was a band meeting about it and the idea arose that we have to threaten them with the publication of the book itself, because we’ve been keeping all the faxes and the press releases. We have everything. That letter essentially says, as politely as we could, “You look really bad in this book. You look like hypocrites. You’re just full of shit. So we’re giving you one last chance to do the right thing. At least write a letter that, in theory, says that we can have our music back to do with as we want.” And to let us deal with Casey Kasem, because he was making threats as well. So there you go. Anyway, that’s that story.

So how important do you think that book is, or the whole event is, in terms of not only people not suing you, but the behavior of corporations more generally with regards to suing one another, suing smaller artists, suing smaller labels?

Mark Hosler: Well, I should mention the other thing that motivated us. The high road we were taking in publicizing this was we really did want to further the public dialogue around these issues, because it was obvious it needed to happen. It was also obvious to us that one day everyone’s gonna have a personal computer, everything’s gonna be digital, and this debate is gonna become super mainstream. That was very clear to everyone in Negativland in ’91, ’92. We could see it.

So that was the high road. The low road was, if we can’t change the world, if we can’t change the laws, can we so humiliate and embarrass these people who are going after us, that at least for us we carve out a safe space, a little sandbox that we can play in and do all our ridiculous sound collage stuff, which makes no money, which isn’t hurting anybody. Can we just carve out a space where we at least can be left the fuck alone? And to get to a question that you alluded to earlier, I think we did. I think we really did. I think that at some point people realized: If we sue these people, they’re actually going to fight us. And if they fight us and they win, it’s gonna establish legal precedent that we don’t want.

That’s something Jon was really articulating to me, and I think connects with Girl Talk and all that too. Girl Talk is a safe space. I’ve lectured at many law schools. I actually was at International Fair Use Day in Washington, D.C., and I was the closing speaker for the whole thing, which kind of shocked me. But they said, “You guys have been dealing with these issues, in a certain way, longer than anyone else at the conference.” I had a number of L.A. entertainment lawyers say—I don’t know how to put this in a way that doesn’t sound immodest, so it makes me a little uncomfortable—but there was some different Hollywood entertainment lawyers that said, “The conversation that you guys propelled into the public sphere got people thinking about the other three factors of fair use.” Because all anyone was ever thinking about was: Did you use some of it? And if you did, you’re gonna be crushed, you’re wrong, end of story. He said, “You guys, with the book and all your interviews and your lectures and everything that you’ve done in getting all this coverage about it, you really did nudge the conversation in a really positive way.” Is that really true? I don’t know, but that was his perception as an L.A. entertainment lawyer. So that was a nice thing to hear from him, for sure.

Jon Leidecker: Negativland’s contribution was making a really funny record. Music makes the argument in a way that critical theory or legal opinions can’t. Wendy J. Gordon’s article, “Fair Use as Market Failure,” was probably the clearest and most precise enunciation of the argument that independent music-making or free speech was no longer possible—good luck licensing a pop music sample for a disc likely to sell a few thousand copies. If her opinion laid out the legal argument for indie sampling as fair use, the U2 single was its proof of concept. Negativland made a really funny record that suddenly you couldn’t hear, and that suddenly everybody was talking about. And as the internet did its thing and you could hear the record by downloading it, the argument traveled by means of a really, really hilarious pop song.

Mark Hosler: Thank you for saying that, Jon, because you reminded me of another thing that was our armor in this fight—the record is just funny.

Jon Leidecker: The record’s too funny to ignore, and it was audibly illegal.

Mark Hosler: It’s illegal, and I’ve met plenty of U2 fans who think it’s great. I don’t think it comes off as hateful against them. It’s just real funny. I still think, to this day, when I look at all the different complexities and layers that make up Negativland, that the U2 single is one of the greatest distillations of everything we do. It’s all in one tidy little package. Plus, you’ve got The Weatherman [David Wills] delivering the greatest lyrical variations.

Jon, I’ve got a question specifically for you—in your interview the other day on WFMU, you said something interesting about how corporations will sue one another, but they won’t sue “down.” They won’t sue a Negativland or a small label after the U2 case. Could you explain what you mean by that? For instance, EMI’s battle against Danger Mouse, does that not count because it’s only cease and desist letters that were sent back and forth, but they secretly didn’t want to actually go to court?

Jon Leidecker: Well, to back up, the lawsuits against John Oswald and Negativland need to be seen in context with the escalating lawsuits against hip-hop artists, all of which were on major record labels. But those were frequently not label against label, those were coming from individual songwriters. For instance, the person who wrote “Alone Again (Naturally),” Gilbert O’Sullivan, suing Biz Markie, that was a songwriter who had fallen out of the major label system suing to nail down the intellectual property law behind his not being credited for his songwriting contribution to Biz Markie’s song. A similar situation happened with the Turtles suing De La Soul. In some ways, those were volleys from artists protecting their own rights by lobbing lawsuits against major labels. The politics of that are very, very thorny and very interesting, but it was also just a tap on the shoulder to major labels that these issues were not going to go away.

Arguments concerning musical ownership are like Russian dolls within Russian dolls, and the ethical arguments can’t be untangled from the moment in time. What was shocking when the lawsuits suddenly progressed to John Oswald and Negativland was that those were major labels. The CRIA [Canadian Recording Industry Association] suing John Oswald was shocking, because that was an art project that wasn’t even being offered for sale. It was a limited edition of 1,000, which was nothing at the time, being given away for free if you wrote John Oswald for a copy. And the courts, demanding that all existing copies needed to be turned in to be destroyed—that decision was so out of proportion as to be shocking.

We still need a good historical chronology laying out how it was independent songwriters lobbing grenades against major record labels to protect their own works, which then moved on to major labels suing independent avant-garde artists and independent artists to protect their property. There was a feeling that the whole house of cards was going down and the major labels felt themselves to be acting in self-defense.

The ground shifted very slowly. Negativland made such an unbelievable stink bomb after U2 that one senses that there was a hands-off truce. Anything that was getting pressed at only a couple thousand copies just wasn’t getting bothered. It wasn’t even worth a major label’s lawyer fees to draw up a cease and desist. They realized that if you look at some of the records coming out on some of these tiny record labels, these people don’t even own cars. Even the label owners don’t own cars.

There was the interesting case of the Deconstructing Beck (1998) record, which gained enough press for Beck’s lawyer to reflexively fire off a letter, saying “expect to hear from Universal, and from Geffen.” That was the inaugural release of the Illegal Art label. Within 24 hours, Negativland’s Seeland [label] had offered to distribute the record, and instantly, instantly they backed off. They were not going to go there. [Note: the emails between Beck’s lawyer and Negativland can be read here.]

Mark Hosler: By that point, when Geffen issued that letter to Illegal Art, the record had sold a grand total of 300 copies, but somehow, the idea of it did upset somebody enough.

Jon Leidecker: Well, I think we’re getting to another important topic. There was a volley of editorials. Billboard magazine invited Negativland to do an editorial, and wasn’t the main pull quote from it, “Art should not be defined as a business”? That was when Don [Joyce] coined the phrase, “Art must not be defined as a business.” Billboard had two IP lawyers do a rejoinder the next week, saying, “I’m sorry, but the second you’re selling this for money, you are subject to the rules of the marketplace.” You know, the second you’re charging for it, it’s a business.

Mark Hosler: They love to think, “We’re just naive, we’re just stupid musicians, we don’t get it.”

Jon Leidecker: There’s a book that I’ve turned to a lot in recent years, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (1983). People who define things in terms of business cannot understand that art refuses to operate as a business. People don’t really trust art made with a profit motive; art has to be a gift if it’s going to have any credibility in the culture.

All of this flies in the face of the very wording of the Copyright Act, in which art wouldn’t exist if there were no incentives mandating payment of the author. There is also a clever conflation of authors and owners, though as we all know, only those authors who have signed over their publishing ever receive protection. When the authors aren’t the owners of the copyright, you get a Möbius strip of an argument that never lands: Art made for money has no credibility, but only that art which makes money is taken seriously. Luckily, artistic credibility is maintained by making it clear the artists don’t get paid very much. You can’t define art as a business, but conversely, how is the artist even supposed to survive unless they’re allowed to at least make a pittance of a living?

So the truce that was made through the ’90s was that the major labels realized that they would look so terrible if they sued anyone selling less than 10,000 copies, that they just weren’t even going to touch it. And slowly, sampling becomes more and more commercial with every passing year. Things like Kid606 start selling 20,000 copies, and still the labels aren’t going to risk it. When Danger Mouse happens, the reflexive cease and desist leads to 250,000 downloads, which then leads to the cementing of Danger Mouse as a commercially viable recording artist who went on to produce U2. A career is born. The legal reflex has become a form of the industry scratching its own back, and minting a new recording star that they can then turn around and offer money to.

Mark Hosler: And I would say we had a hit lawsuit (laughter).

Jon Leidecker: Yes, and I understand that today’s interview is going to be 99% about the hit lawsuit and the resulting things, and not the work the band’s been doing for—you know, but it is fascinating. All the things you can’t talk about and all the things that can’t land because both things are true at once: Art cannot be defined as a business, yet we totally do have a merch table that we live off of, and that fans understand is a contract between the people in the room. You know, we’re insane to be doing what we’re doing, and it’s pathetic and humiliating to be asking for money for it, but we can’t help it. There’s nothing else we can do at this point. All these things are true at once.

Mark Hosler: I really think there’s a subset of people who are creative, that if they had a universal basic income, they’d make their art for nothing. They’d just do it.

Jon Leidecker: That’s what happens in Europe. Vicki Bennett, People Like Us, was visiting San Francisco so often to collaborate that she began talking about moving here… I asked her about her last 10 years on the dole and the public infrastructure that allowed her to record six records in the ’90s of completely illegal music. Yeah, she couldn’t move to America. Her career was entirely enabled by the English art school system and the dole. Brian Eno, Roxy Music, all of these things—that’s art school, that’s public funding. That’s where the music comes from.

I’ve got a little section in the book about Vicky Bennett, about how she makes a living despite not being able to sign to certain labels, sell certain records, et cetera. It never occurred to me that one reason is that she lives in England. It’s a very simple reason, so simple that it never occurred to me.

Mark Hosler: That’s the key. She’s a dear friend of ours, and I certainly do hope you give her her due in your book. She’s important, she’s been doing this a long time now, and what her work has evolved into now is, I think, just extraordinary and beautiful. It’s just incredible what she’s doing with the visuals integrated with sound, amazing.

Again, little things are dislodging from my brain from all the stuff we’re talking about. In the wake of us being sued, for me personally, there was about a month when it was so crushing. It really was, because what we were up against was one of the largest record labels in the world, and there was this feeling I had of, well, we are being sued over one particular project, but this is what we do. Should we stop?

And I remember having a conversation with Don, who’s older, who knew more about art history than I did. He said, “Oh my God, no.” He said we have to keep going. We have to keep setting an example of why this is a perfectly legitimate way to create things. He was a rock going through that. He was like, “No fucking way are we backing down.” That doesn’t mean we’re gonna keep making audio collage about appropriation like we did for the Fair Use book, but just by our existence. Even though, as Jon kind of alluded to, 95% of the press we get isn’t about our music at all, it’s about all the hoaxes and pranks and press releases and the axe murder. But I personally don’t really care because I think that if you’re drawn to actually checking out our work, it holds up. It’s not bullshit, what we’ve been doing for four decades. We work really, really hard. That’s why our records take years to finish because we’re really working hard collectively to make something that has a great deal of complexity and depth to it so that it rewards active listening.

Jon Leidecker: Most people hate experimental music. We might enjoy a wider profile than most experimental bands for extra-musical controversies and the ideas they bring up, but those ideas are deeply tied to the music. I basically see Negativland as a meta-media project that helps you think about the way in which most modern music is made. When you hear music made with samples and recordings, it helps you think about all popular music, which by now is made entirely out of captured and manipulated recordings. It’s all collage, all multi-author, and has been since the Beatles. But the extra-musical reasons for which this band gained a penchant—first, cultural jamming and media pranks, and then later the hit lawsuit, which led to the enunciation of fair use as a legal defense for this—they helped journalists talk about things that were happening across the entire field of popular music.

Mark Hosler: Yeah, I realized early on that so many music journalists were frustrated writers and that most interviews with musicians were not very interesting, and that they were looking for something. I thought, I hope we’re giving them something interesting to write about and we have something to say about this.

I mean, as a music writer, it’s a godsend—a juicy story with lawyers and lawsuits and the David versus Goliath angle.

Mark Hosler: Actually, when we did Dispepsi (1997), the stack of press that generated—again, almost never talking about the music, but about, how is it that you guys as a group have already been sued, you’ve already been through the wringer, you’ve been through so much hell because of what you do, and now you’re risking being sued by the second largest soft drink manufacturer in the world? Like, are you crazy?

Jon Leidecker: Pathological.

Mark Hosler: Yeah, it was pathological. We got interviewed by a different media place every day for like a month and a half, from people who just couldn’t believe that we were doing it. But we turned that around to say, “Isn’t it amazing that your gut reaction to us doing it, the first thing you think of, is that we shouldn’t be doing it? What does that say about you, and what does that say about this culture that we’re living in?” Of course, we’re embedded within capitalism, but so many of us don’t really think about how deeply that affects our worldview. It normalizes so many things that actually aren’t normal at all. They’re just crazy things we’ve agreed upon about how our system’s supposed to work, as if that’s the only way a system could ever work.

I want to talk about fair use as a concept. I read this article by Edward Lee, and he has this concept called “fair use avoidance.” He did a big survey of all the music copyright cases, I think starting in 1994 with the 2 Live Crew case. Nobody has defended on fair use grounds—in music at least, in other arts, yes, but not in music—since then. That’s 30 years. My question is, is this a case of both the artists and the labels being too scared to get a precedent that they won’t like?

Jon Leidecker: That’s “Why hasn’t Girl Talk been sued yet?” (laughter).

Yeah, now we’re back here again.

Jon Leidecker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think things like the Deconstructing Beck showdown, when Negativland got involved, we were notorious for having all of these lawyers willing to work for us for free. After the U2 case, lots of people came out of the woodwork from Stanford volunteering their time to represent the band, telling us we could have won the case with free speech and fair use arguments had it gone to court, and those lawyers wanted to win those precedents that would lead to needed copyright reforms.

Mark Hosler: We had like five different lawyers that we could call on the phone at any time to just kind of go, “Hey, this is what’s going on now. What do you think? What’s your opinion?” We did that when we were making Dispepsi. We had a whole legal team advising us. We didn’t change the music in the slightest, given their advice, but we did change the packaging design, because it was trademark infringement. It does not have a fair use component to it.

Jon Leidecker: The laws are different for trademarks and patents. But a case in which the defendant argued for their right to transformative fair use—that had a chance to win, and it would go outside the normal lines of property and ownership usually argued in major label copyright cases, where a major label is suing another major label. And we believe the word got out that they were likely to lose. We didn’t see any further cases against defendants who were ready to defend themselves. All of those cases were strategically avoided, even though there were hundreds, thousands of people sampling egregiously.

The cases we did see pursued were all label-on-label, and usually decided against the sampling party. Cases like the sample-chasing guy who owns the George Clinton back catalog suing NWA for a 10-year-old sample of a Funkadelic track in which something had been pitched down several octaves so severely that nobody even knew it was a Funkadelic sample—until Dr. Dre thought the statute had passed and admitted to it in an interview. That was something like a $100 billion case because NWA had licensed it to a Hollywood film and an unbelievable amount of royalties had accrued. George Clinton famously does not own his own back catalog and receives absolutely none of that money. Whenever a case does proceed and make it across the finish line, it’s major label on major label, and the lawyers usually extract more and more and more money. They usually push the line further away from fair use.

So we get cases like the “Blurred Lines” case in which an unsympathetic artist like Robin Thicke admitting that he’d been influenced by Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up” during the recording of a track—no notes or chords in common, just studying the feel and arrangement—that was enough to produce a guilty verdict. All of these case-by-case precedents seem to reinforce the author’s rights, the idea that you’ve got to pay even if you’ve simply been influenced. But those mad verdicts are filing in from 2000 to 2015 against the backdrop of Pirate Bay, download blogs, platforms being built on the internet’s sharing economy. So while Girl Talk was making more than enough money to draw a lawsuit, he was on Illegal Art, owned by an activist [Philo T. Farnsworth] who was ready to fight in court using fair use arguments that were quite likely to win a case, explode the entire game, and get us the reforms championed by Creative Commons. Those lawsuits never arrived. The lawyers are going to milk the idea of the moral purity of the author, the moral rights of the author, as far as they can and yet they’re not going to touch any actual independent artists who are likely to bring up fair use. They strategically avoid all of those.

Mark Hosler: In the liner notes [to Dispepsi] we have a suggested reading list of anti-corporate books and stuff to do with legal things. It’s a bit heavy-handed that we put that in there, but the only reason it’s there is for the lawyers at Pepsi. When they got that record, we wanted them to see it. It frames it in a way that suggests to them that if you go after us, we’re going to fight you. The lawyers that were advising us when we were finalizing Dispepsi said, “They’re going to try and get a summary judgment if they go after you. You need to have a response already written. You won’t have any time.” So we actually worked with them to write a response to the imagined summary judgment that Pepsi was going to give Negativland so that we could hit the ground running to fight back.

We were taking that very seriously about what this fight might entail, but not wanting to compromise what we’re doing artistically at all, not in the slightest. So we’ve got to be prepared to fight these guys because we’re in the public eye, people know of us. A Pepsi spokesperson was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly about our record and I think their response was snarky, which was “It’s no Abbey Road, but it’s a pretty good listen,” and in another place, “It’s no Odelay, but it’s a pretty good listen.” So they knew about it, and we knew that eventually they were going to find out about it.

Jon Leidecker: That was very interesting, watching the commercial success of those Beck records like Odelay. They’re covered with samples, but the only samples listed are the ones owned by other major labels. My favorite example of this: Island Records, a year after the U2 lawsuit, put out The Orb’s Live ’93. I like their records, it’s longform sample collage, mixing flows, a BBC sound effects record going for two minutes in the background. Clearly, some of that has to be licensed. That record does have a partial sample list, and what was very telling was what ended up being mentioned, what they bothered to license, were other commercial properties. When they sample Minnie Riperton, clearly that major label is getting a check. Live ’93 was a two-CD live record that starts with an unbelievable 90 seconds of the Tape-beatles record, Music With Sound 2. But we know from [band members] Lloyd [Dunn] and Ralph [Johnson] that they were never contacted. They were too small to even bother to license. Island Records does not pay for anything they don’t have to, nor open themselves to liability by admitting it in the packaging. Again, when copyright leverages the moral authority of the author, it’s for a system in which authors and owners are rarely the same entities. The owners are corporations instead of people, and the system exists to structure payment: the money goes in, not out. There’s lots of stuff mentioned in the packaging: Ennio Morricone, yes, that gets mentioned. Grace Jones, that gets mentioned. All the stuff too small to bother to pay, the major label does not have to pay. They take it.

Mark Hosler: The album Music for the People (1991) by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. You know this record? It starts out with a three- or four-second sample from Negativland’s Escape from Noise album. On that record they also sampled from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” which they definitely cleared. But to Jon’s point, we didn’t hear from them. The great thing about it is that Marky Mark interrupts the Negativland sample to diss it. It’s great! He’s an awful, phony baloney, white rapper. But we thought it was so funny that we sampled him dissing his sampling of us in the “Gimme the Mermaid” track, which is in the Dead Dog Records CD in the Fair Use book. (In mocking imitation of Marky Mark) “Yo man, shut up, I ain’t even going out like ‘dat! I make the music for the people.”

Jon Leidecker: That would have been a decent check. Millions and millions of dollars. And he’s still famous, Mark.

Mark Hosler: Yeah, I know. Every time I see some movie that he’s going to be in—in fact, I’ve even seen a few movies that he’s in—it’s kind of weird.

Jon Leidecker: We’re the losers!

Mark Hosler: Back in the early 2000s when I was lecturing about this, one of the “gotcha” questions that people would ask me at the end of my lecture would be, “Well, that’s all well and good what you’re saying, Mr. Hosler and Negativland, about your attitude about appropriation, but how would you feel if you were sampled on a record that sold a million copies and you weren’t paid?” And then my response is, “We were! The Funky Bunch did sell a million copies. And no, we were not paid. And that’s fine.” And we think it’s an awful record, but no.

Jon Leidecker: Fatboy Slim—Did Norman Cook pay for the “Michael Jackson” sample?

Mark Hosler: Well, yes, they did. But that’s what’s so horrible—They didn’t pay it to us, no, they paid it to Greg Ginn.

Jon Leidecker: Right.

Mark Hosler: Yes, but the reason we publicized that is that Fatboy Slim’s track, which he called “Michael Jackson,” sampled from our track called “Michael Jackson.” But what he sampled from us was [originally from] a flexi-disc that I had stolen from the basement of a church where I was working as a preschool teacher. So he went to SST Records, because that album that he sampled from was on SST. By that point, our relationship with Greg Ginn had disintegrated. So Fatboy Slim’s people went to SST, paid them $1,000 to use a sample that SST had no rights to, because we’d taken it without permission. Of course, if he’d come to us directly, we would have said, “You can have it. We don’t want any money. That goes against our ideas about the reuse of culture.”

When all this came to light, the Fatboy Slim track “Michael Jackson” was licensed in a Coca-Cola commercial. When we learned that a track that had been licensed in a Coca-Cola commercial used a sample that he’d paid $1,000 for from a Negativland track that we had no right to even sell to him—nor would we have wanted to if he’d even asked—we wrote up a press release about this, because we thought it was a great example of the stupid insanity of this whole system. That led to Fatboy Slim’s management reaching out to threaten us to retract what we were saying, and that they would somehow go after us. It wasn’t clear what they were going to do. There were threats against Negativland.

I actually ended up on the phone, because I was like, “Fuck it. I’m just going to call them on the phone. This is ridiculous.” I said, “What are you even talking about? What are these threats?” And they said, “Well, your press release said that Fatboy Slim was stupid, and it hurt his feelings. He was upset.” I said, “If you reread it, we didn’t say he was stupid. We said what he did was stupid. I think they’re a little bit different.” I said that we’re not retracting anything, because we just told the story, it’s true. But the reason they were flipping out, I think, is because they were afraid Coca-Cola was going to come to them and say, “What the fuck? What did you just sell us? We just licensed something you didn’t have the rights to license to us.” I think that was money they were worried about losing.

Jon Leidecker: Typical label noise, where the record label has signed a contract and believes themselves in good faith to have licensed the sample, but there’s always somebody else who is involved that the contract didn’t cover. And often the musicians getting sampled aren’t getting covered by the publishing: Clyde Stubblefield has never been paid for the “Funky Drummer” sample. People say that we need more layers of copyright to cover individual musical performances on samples, so that Clyde Stubblefield wouldn’t have needed to ask for public donations when he finally needed a kidney in old age. This is somebody who’s been sampled more than almost anybody else and was just utterly destitute. James Brown certainly didn’t need that money by that point.

However, how does that work? There was an article in Pitchfork the other day sympathetically covering the two guys claiming to have invented the dembow riddim that almost all reggaeton is based on. The article unpacks a lot of painful truths about how musicians in subcultures are rarely recompensed, rarely get the credit or see any financial gains when their sounds start showing up in Superbowl commercials. All true. Is the solution to award the copyright to these two guys and then award them all of the rights for every single song that’s used that rhythm? So far, we’ve managed to avoid pulling the trigger on copywriting rhythms. Europe in general has been very, very careful, has pulled back on awarding any copyright for rhythmic beats, because where do you stop? How do you copyright 4/4? Legal ownership of four on the floor, that’s where that goes. Yet this agonizing Pitchfork article talking about the moral rights, I mean, it was pulling the heart strings for how it’s finally time to begin recognizing the contributions—and what they’re actually arguing for is more money for lawyers than we have ever seen before.

Mark Hosler: I certainly had that impression in the early days of the U2 lawsuit, that there was more than a bit of a stink of—how much are these things being motivated by lawyers who just see a chance to get more billable hours? They just talk to the people who they work for, like, “You know, you should do this.” How much does that drive these threats, over all of the ’90s?

I have a question—This might be a good final question, which is what can an average person, somebody like me, do in support of fair use and the public domain? I was reading Peter Jaszi’s book, in which he’s very idealistic about it. He says the common man just needs to stand up for their rights. But then his example is a woman who got a DMCA takedown notice because a Prince song was playing in the background of a video she put on YouTube. So she said, “Well, I’m not having it,” and she hired a lawyer [Note: the woman in question, Stephanie Lenz, was in fact represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation] and it was a years-long struggle. It took about a decade to settle it.

And Jaszi said, “So see, you can do it too. You can just hire a lawyer and devote your life to this for ten years.” But clearly not everybody can do these sorts of things, so is there anything that you can do as a non-musician, as a non-artist, to support fair use?

Mark Hosler: Matthew, I have no idea. I would say that what Don Joyce was saying in 1991 in the wake of the U2 lawsuit against Negativland is still true. From a creative standpoint, we just keep doing this stuff. And I think if you look at the history of social justice movements, the ending of slavery, the right to vote, women’s rights, just look at everything that changes for the better in terms of more rights and more freedoms for more people. It always starts from the bottom up. Power never concedes anything without a fight.

They never concede anything for any moral or ethical reasons. They always do it for self-serving reasons. Usually they throw you a bone to shut you up. You know, we ended up with a 40-hour work week, not because the owners saw the light of day, but because the strikes and the violence and everything that was happening was so over the top that they were like, “Okay, well, instead of working 14 hours a day, you can work 12. How about that?” And then eventually, “Well, what about 10?” And you just keep throwing them a bone. So that’s not great, but that is how change happens. My own limited perspective on change throughout human history is that that’s how it happens.

Jon Leidecker: Is your question basically how to resist?

Yeah.

Jon Leidecker: The thing we’re trying really hard in this band to get our heads around is just how offensive it is that the core of the fair use argument is now being used by the AI companies to justify a complete corporate grab of the entirety of all digitized art, to provide tools that artists will now be expected to rent and not own themselves, to produce art that one shares on free platforms. The end stage of this sharing economy is snapping into focus for everyone.

Things like OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Jon Leidecker: Yeah, they’re erasing that last conceptual line between producer and consumer. Just as many people no longer buy records, films, or books, no longer keep archives. Call it a “sharing economy,” but what it is, is you renting in order to be allowed to share everything you make. Now that AI companies have assimilated our arguments for transformative fair use, we are sometimes asked if we’re still on “Team Fair Use,” if we’re staying consistent with our arguments hashed out in the 90’s, the ethics of Open Source that built the Internet as we know it. It has done our heads in a bit, but when we turned to fair use, our core argument was that corporations are making it really hard for us to exist, to make independent art in the digital age. So we took a hardline stance, and in the decades since, what seemed like a victory was in fact a slow creep.

Like, YouTube was great when it came along because anyone can upload, it feels egalitarian. It’s still not really clear that what YouTube did was legal. They were just introduced into the marketplace and instantly began making so many billions that in good faith, with a product that everyone enjoyed, they cut deals with the people who owned the media. Spotify followed suit. Bandcamp even followed suit. We’re all just trying to eke out individual marketplaces within a world in which nobody really gets paid that much for anything, but at least everybody gets to participate, even if the principles behind payment, monetization, ownership, copyright are now quite unregulated and less apparent to us all. Now the final swindle is coming, and what’s most horrifying with the argument that AI outputs are a transformative fair use, is that the corporations are asking to be spared from any real responsibility for where the data in the models come from, as well as any responsibility for what comes out of those models. The concept being floated is: there will be no independent artists, only users; users are amateurs, they are renters.

Fair use for art making really shouldn’t be the frame for any of these conversations at all. The conversation should be, why do private corporations get to own this technology? Is AI compatible with human rights? Is AI compatible with democracy? Why are these companies not being held responsible for their hallucinating outputs? Why should the production of counterfeits, designed to deceive us, be a legal business model? This is an end run on democracy, a power grab that goes successfully for them as long as we’re talking about art, instead of personhood, oligarchy, and human rights. The resistance needs to begin at a much higher level than hiring a lawyer to make sure that you can post your video that has some Prince in the background.

Mark Hosler: Yeah, what he said! That’s great, Jon. We need to be asking different questions than the ones we’ve been asking. It’s amazing to now have lived long enough to see our very arguments being used by these AI companies to justify what they’re doing. There’s confusion about how we even have a conversation about it, and I think Jon’s insight there is brilliant, that the art conversation is kind of a fake out. That’s not the right place to be putting your energy and your thoughts about why this is problematic. It’s about human rights and about democracy, and having a functional democracy, which we clearly don’t really have.

Jon Leidecker: Well, Peter Thiel is very honest with people about how you can use technology to do an end-run on democracy. Capitalism and democracy are no longer compatible, but technology is so powerful that you don’t need to get people to vote for anything anymore. When they say you can just do things, change money, change the way you incorporate a state... that’s the work that they’re doing, and in the meantime we’re just arguing about transformative fair use to make pictures of—oh god, I can’t even, I can’t even.

I’m gonna send a quote into the chat. This is the RIAA and ASCAP and BMI and those folks responding to the U.S. Department of Commerce, who put out a call for responses to possible changes to the copyright law. This is what they say: “Legalizing the unauthorized use of pre-existing material triggers a form of class warfare between appropriation artists and original artists, and should be avoided as a matter of public policy.” I mean, language like that…

Mark Hosler: Who said that?

This is the RIAA, ASCAP, BMI, all of these groups together, all the copyright holders.

Jon Leidecker: It’s strange bedfellows. Do you know the activist Neil Turkowitz?

No.

Jon Leidecker: He’s one of the guys who’s most outspoken about how AI engines are stealing the fruits of artists’ labor. He’s very, very online, and while I share his ire on so many points, there’s something in his defense of copyright that’s spun 180 degrees from us, and then I finally realized that, oh, he worked for the RIAA for 20 years. When he retired, Cary Sherman [former CEO of the RIAA] wrote him a great going-away letter. Strange bedfellows. But class warfare, I love it when that term comes up. “Oh boy, we really want to avoid that French Revolution. The pitchforks are going to come for you too!”

It strikes me that the class warfare has been going on for a long time, but they’ve been winning it. They have the lawyers, and they have the major labels, and the money.

Mark Hosler: I can’t speak to the attitude of Vicki Bennett, or Greg Gillis, or John Oswald, but for Negativland, one of the ways we talked about it amongst ourselves, and then talked about it to the public, is that the stuff we’re creating is our own act of self-defense. This is us trying to make sense of this insane world we live in, and this is our way of speaking back to all of it in some way. So there’s no warfare going on between artists from our perspective.

When I was at that intellectual property symposium at Duke University in 2003, and Cary Sherman was there, I showed the “Gimme the Mermaid” video that we made working with filmmaker Tim Maloney, and that utilizes Walt Disney’s Ariel. I was going to talk about various policy things, and I was in a room full of like a hundred different people who were all movers and shakers in the IP world, from a more progressive standpoint, but none of them are artists. What I ended up deciding to do instead, was I threw out my notes, and I said, “What I’m going to talk to you about today is just how fun it is, and interesting, and irresistible as a creative person, to work this way, to make this stuff.” If you don’t make art yourself, or make music, you may not quite get the irresistible lure. As Don Joyce said, “Never underestimate the power of interesting.” You do it because it’s interesting to do. In fact, you’re not even necessarily sure if it’s good or bad, it’s just interesting. For a certain kind of creative person, that’s a really juicy place to be.

So I gave that presentation about how we created that specific piece of music, where all the elements came from, how we were inspired to make it, how we then collaborated with an animator who worked for Walt Disney and made the video in his spare hours, on their computers. I said, “Look, clearly, we’re stealing from Walt Disney. But also, clearly, it’s our work.”

It’s absolutely clear that this is something Negativland made, not something Disney made. How do you square those two things together? And I turned to Cary Sherman and said, “If you want, you could get on your cell phone and call your buddies at Disney and tell them to go after us. But I hope you can see that this is an original work… of things we stole (laughter). Can you get your head around it?”

Jon Leidecker: The interesting thing about this work is that the U2 single involves celebrities, and so it got people talking about the way in which all music is made. All music is pretty much made with manipulated pre-recordings. At this point, sampling is just the thing that throws the light bulb on for a 12 year old that wonders how they can participate themselves and lets you think about maybe making music yourself. Fast forward 30 years, and now anybody texting is using photo editors. TikTok is less a social media engine than it is Adobe Premiere repackaged as a video editing app that an 8 year old can understand. Editing media is speaking the language of power. So the point of making art out of this isn’t about making entertainment, it’s about teaching 8 year olds how to talk, really talk.

But when I think about AI tools, I’m thinking less about making pictures with this stuff than what to do about the fact that Microsoft just purchased Three Mile Island so that they can reactivate a nuclear power plant to have enough energy to train their next-generation AI model. Yeah, Microsoft bought Three Mile Island. That’s a target to resist. The argument should not be about how to make stuff with this, it’s whether or not we should. The fact that we’re feeding these machines the water that we’re going to need to survive as human beings within the next five years, 10 years, that’s the argument. Do you live next to Three Mile Island? This argument is coming home to you now. They’re taking our water.

Well, that’s terrifying, but it weirdly gives me a little bit of hope because that’s clearly a message that’s more effective than, “Your pictures shouldn’t be made of their pictures.” The sort of roundabout way through copyright is much less effective, I think, than these sorts of issues.

Mark Hosler: I mean, I don’t know how much this is going to get into people’s brains because it’s so removed from the thing that’s distracting you right here, right? But that’s the most shocking thing of all, is like, really? I’m living through the effects of climate change right here, where I’m talking to you from right now, and the idea that the amount of energy that’s going to be used to drive this new economic engine that’s going to make a tiny number of people bazillionaires is like—I want to just go blow everything up that they’re trying to do, you know?

Jon Leidecker: But the appeal of using a 33 1/3 on plunderphonics is an overall argument of how intellectual property issues have inverted over the last 30 years, how it used to be a countercultural thing. I am sympathetic to the trend of YouTube creators angry about plagiarism, their content being appropriated, re-collaged, when I imagine it from their perspective. The commercial model for the last 15 years is that the platforms are owned—you’re welcome to share and maybe sign up for monetization, if you want—but mostly, you just post stuff, some of which gets millions and millions of views, and other people get the money. So the kids are right to be angry about this “sharing economy,” it makes sense that the social praxis has inverted over the last 30 years, and this is a great opportunity to write a really concise book about the musical artists, the avant-garde, and how the rug was pulled out from under the avant-garde and became the corporate argument.

Mark Hosler: And related to what Jon’s talking about, I remember this goes back again to something Don Joyce of Negativland, now deceased, was predicting in the ’90s, he said, “I think appropriation, collage, and reuse of other people’s stuff is going to become one of the preeminent creative forms in the next century.” And that’s what TikTok is, it’s a 10-year-old doing an avant-garde transgressive appropriation-based thing to make some fun lip-sync video or whatever they’re making. But that’s what always happens throughout history, we see avant-garde ideas in art, in politics, in lifestyle and fashion, and anything that works, they percolate into the mainstream. Now that’s something we’ve lived long enough to see happen.

I’m only saying this because your book is going to be read by people who, the idea that you can take something that isn’t yours and reuse it is like, “Well, what’s the big deal with that? I’ve been doing that since I was 8 years old.” It’s trying to contextualize that. When I think of the pushback against what we were doing in the ’80s, and what John Oswald was doing—a certain kind of person was shocked. Like, “Are you crazy? How do you even think you could do that?” It really bothered people. It’s hard to convey how much it disturbed people that you were taking things that weren’t yours and reusing them to make stuff. But I’ve met so many people over the years who are inspired by it. They say, “The first time I ever heard anyone do it was this album Escape from Noise (1987). And the fact that you could do that—it flipped my brain in a way that was really good. It opened me up to a whole different way of thinking about what is and is not art and music.”

Well, I think that’s a great message, and a good place to stop. I want to thank both of you, and Jon, I especially want to make sure to thank you for that podcast series [Variations through Barcelona’s MACBA museum] that you did in 2008 or 2009, because it was one of the first things that I found when I started researching and was it like, “Oh, I start with Charles Ives! That’s how far back this goes.”

Mark Hosler: So we have Jon to thank for the Ives leading for you. That’s great.

And I want to thank you for talking to me, Mark, in the midst of, literally, a hurricane. So everything that you’re going through—everything’s fine?

Mark Hosler: (Tilting his camera towards his backyard) See, it’s fine! And it’s beautiful. Look at that tree.

That genuinely is really beautiful.

Mark Hosler: Yeah, oh, it is. I live somewhere super beautiful. Yeah, I’m very, very fortunate.

Matthew Blackwell’s book, Plunderphonics, is out now via Bloomsbury here. More information about Negativland can be found here.

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Further Reading Recommendations by Jon Leidecker

• Wendy J. Gordon, “Fair Use as Market Failure: A Structural and Economic Analysis of the Betamax Case and Its Predecessors” (1982)

• Susan Scafidi, Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law (2005)

• Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (1993)

• Alexandre Montagu and David Bellos, Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (2024)

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