Nina Paley's Attribution Song - the difference between copying and plagiarism

Nina Paley's latest meme-y video, "Credit is Due (The Attribution Song)" is a great, provocative one-minute short on the value of correctly attributing work when you use it. Paley is a thoughtful copyright abolitionist, and she uses this song to talk about the difference between plagiarism (a kind of fraud) and copying (the basis for culture).

In the accompanying essay, Paley cops to the complexity of "always giving credit," and discusses the difficulty of exhaustively crediting everyone who's made a contribution to your work:

Attribution is a way to help your neighbor. You share not only the work, but information about the work that helps them pursue their own research and maybe find more works to enjoy. How much one is expected to help their neighbor is determined by (often unspoken) community standards. People who don't help their neighbors tend to be disliked. And those who go out of their way to deceive and defraud their neighbors - i.e. plagiarists - are hated and shunned. Plagiarism doesn't affect works - works don't have feelings, and what is done to one copy has no effect on other copies. Plagiarism affects communities, and it is consideration for such that determines where attribution is appropriate.

At least that's the best I can come up with right now. Attribution is actually a very complicated concept; if you have more ideas about it, please share.

Credit is Due (The Attribution Song) (via Command Line)

• [boo]

  Credit ‘is’ due!

  Please, please, please acknowledge an obvious source. I don’t give a shit if you copy Michelangelo, whose copyright ran out long ago.

  Be respectful of your sources: remember that they have lives to live and bills to pay.

• [Blackwell]

  Whenever I listen to the cast album of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” I can’t help but imagine the fantastic job Nina Paley would do if she were to animate it as a feature movie. Unfortunately, for that kind of major project, she is likely going to have to deal with producers that very-strongly believe in copyright.

• [Tavie]

  Was it here that I saw Paley’s Minute Meme#1 – Copying Is Not Theft linked, too? Good stuff.

• [holtt]

  Has she done any purely art pieces since Sita Sings the Blues? It was brilliant.

• [robcat2075]

  By omitting the whole issue of permission she’s implying it’s fair use if you just give attribution.

• [jfrancis]

  What??? I heard someone else wrote this song.

• [oyvinja]

  I fear that might not have been the real Beethoven, but an impersonator; he was suspiciously tech savvy for a person who’s been dead for so long. A disguised agent for the RIAA, perhaps?

• [JoshP]

  The thing about use and copy… well modern copy, well its modern connotation,ahem, is it’s difference to different people for different things. Like a lot of us I grew up reading classic mythology. When I got older I found out that the western poetic tradition, for good or ill or whatever, was steeped in reference. It allowed the poet to increase the symbolic content of his work while keeping the piece itself short, ya know, like concentrated orange juice. So when a poet or writer starts ‘copying’, hell even when a pop artist is ‘copying’, is it a reference, an homage, a critique, a satire, a tongue in cheek jest?? This should be up to the consumer if done correctly. It should never, ever, however be up to a lawyer… just saying.

• [MacBookHeir]

  Nice video, in a “Ren and Stimpy” kind of way – I was thinking Nina could have used a more relevant composer or artist, as the works of Beethoven are in the public domain. Many public domain works (especially the Blues) are slightly re-written or re-titled by modern artists and therefore need no attribution. Otherwise, I really like the “Ren and Stimpy” influence on this video!

  • [Cory Doctorow]

    Her whole point is that attribution is a separate, ethical/normative issue from copyright, and so she deliberately chose a public domain artist.

• [mail4joeg]

  Ummm – Did they get permission for the PERFORMANCE of that Beethoven riff at the end???

  Irony alert, run amok.

• [agreenster]

  /sarcasm/

  Yes, because plagiarism on the internet is a huge problem these days. Sharing copyrighted music, movies, software and games on the internet, however, is not a problem at all. Nope. Not a bit.

  /sarcasm/

• [Anonymous]

  Love her use of Besmirch and Search for a rhyme!

• [Anonymous]

  I find it deeply strange that the vocals in this cutesy video were done by Bliss Blood, the frontwoman of dark and sinister industrial band Pain Teens