Plagiarism, piracy, technology in art: John Oswald's plunderphonics and technology through an STS perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plunderphonics is a concept introduced by Canadian musician John Oswald (1985) at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto. Oswald argues that the use of samples should be unrestricted, regardless of permission or payment of royalties, as long as clear reference to the original artist is maintained. Plunderphonics critiques the formation and functioning of copyright laws, drawing on the history of their creation, the influence of technology on musical composition and consumption, and the everevolving role of the audience in relation to these technologies. This dissertation aims to investigate Oswald’s critique of copyright laws through a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) perspective, relating the author’s writings to the historical context of the creation of these laws. Using the theoretical frameworks of Andrew Feenberg and Langdon Winner, this dissertation seeks to explore the debates surrounding plagiarism through the lens of three specific cases of artistic creation based on pre-existing works: Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans (1981); Brazilian DJ Masa’s QQVCQUER Remix (2012); and Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy music video (2019). By analysing the gaps in plunderphonic discussions, its limitations and possibilities, and identifying issues that arise in artistic practice, the research aims to deepen the critique of the current functioning of copyright laws, thus assessing the viability of plunderphonics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
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".