Bibliographic record
Abstract
Featuring interviews with John Oswald, Negativland, and others and drawing on a wealth of research on copyright and intellectual property, Plunderphonics explores the impact of a genre that made illegality a point of pride. In Plunderphonics, Matthew Blackwell tells the story of a group of musicians who advocated for changes to the copyright system by deploying unlicensed samples in their recordings. The composer John Oswald, who coined the genre term “plunderphonics,” was threatened with legal action by the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of Michael Jackson. The Bay Area group Negativland was sued by Island Records on behalf of U2 for their parody of the band. These artists attracted media attention to their cause in a bid to expand fair use protections. Later, the Australian band the Avalanches encountered the limitations of the music licensing system during the release of their debut album, having to drop several samples that could not be successfully cleared. Finally, American DJ and producer Girl Talk released a series of albums featuring hundreds of uncleared samples and successfully avoided lawsuits by publicly arguing a fair use defense. This book narrates the conflicts between these artists and the recording industry. Blackwell places plunderphonics in the cultural contexts of postmodernism, Situationism, and culture jamming and analyzes responses to the genre from the media and the legal system. Along with histories of each artist, changes to American copyright law are tracked through important cases like Grand Upright v. Warner Bros. and Bridgeport v. Dimension Films. Though the legal terrain did not shift in the favor of plunderphonic musicians, they changed public perception of fair use and enabled more widespread sampling in underground music.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.408 | 0.091 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".