Two-track copyright policy

Yesterday, the Guardian ran Cory Doctorow’s article, “Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses.” He distinguishes between business-copyright and folk-copyright. The former is what happens when, for example, a record label negotiates the rights to a song for a particular TV advertisement. One lawyer calls another, writes a contract, money changes hands and the song “Baba O’Reilly” can get used to sell me auto insurance or something.

The idea of folk-copyright pertains to cultural use. The sort of pedestrian usage of a babysitter bringing DVDs to keep her charge occupied, making mix tapes, covering songs in a garage or a bar, or photocopying a comic strip for your cubicle wall.

Nobody calls the lawyers at United Feature Syndicate to ask if they can duplicate yesterday’s Dilbert for hanging the office fridge. What Doctorow advocates is a more descriptive rather than prescriptive copyright law. To describe the situation: on a folk/person-to-person scale, people are sharing copyright material freely. This use is often a cultural exchange (e.g. teenagers learning guitar by playing copyrighted riffs). Cultural exchange simply isn’t going to stop.

Also coming in yesterday is William Patry’s blog post on copyrighted jokes. It’s a thought-provoking angle on Doctorow’s article. It’s one thing to personally compile David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists and publish, distribute and sell them, making oneself a tidy profit. It seems to be another thing to imitate Robin Williams’s jokes on stage. And it’s a third thing to quote Family Guy to my girlfriend.

Among preachers, the practice of a folk-copyright (“cultural exchange”) is routine. In such an oral medium, I do not find offense at someone using an analogy that they lifted out of my preaching. Once a story, an illustration, a sermon is out into the oral sphere, it is free for the taking. Attribution is only a courtesy. This type of folk-copyright has been known in Christian preaching for centuries and serves as a helpful guide for contemporary policy.

Preaching and the Laplace Transform

When studying preaching, we learned about some of the general formulas that sermons follow. The classic three-point sermon, the church equivalent of an eighth-grade five-paragraph essay, is easily recognized. Eugene Lowry treated the narrative sermon, building up to a single climax that the preacher resolves, in The Homiletical Plot. There are just about as many forms of sermons as there are integers.

One method that grabbed my attention was Paul Scott Wilson’s method, The Four Pages of the Sermon. His method depends on two particular assertions. First, that the world of the Scriptures is intimately connected to the world we inhabit today. Secondly, that the Scriptural story presents problems and their resolution.

So, the “four pages” of his sermons would flow like this, with an example:

1. Identify a problem in the Scriptures (1 Cor. 1:10-17–the Christian Church faces division)
2. Identify a problem in our world (Too many to number–factions and discrimination plague us today)
3. Present God’s solution in the Scriptures (1 Cor. 1:18-25–Christ’s strength and wisdom makes all people one)
4. Present God’s solution in our world (Question our own wisdom; find prayerful unity)

After adding some material to introduce and conclude the sermon, you have about five pages that should last a respectable 10-12 minutes.

Keeping one eye on our problems, we find an analogous problem in the Scriptures. Seeing a solution on the pages of Scripture, we track our eye back to a Godly solution for our problem.

The Laplace transform is a species of the same genus. Given an certain type ordinary differential equation, solving it directly is very difficult. So, you take the hard problem (f(t)) you have. Using the Laplace transform, you turn it into a polynomial that’s easy to solve (F(s)). With the solution to the easy problem, you do another Laplace transform and turn that into the solution to the hard problem.

Like the four pages of a sermon, it looks like this:

1. Identify the hard problem: ordinary differential equation f(t)
2. Transform the hard problem into an easy problem: polynomial F(s)
3. Solve the easy problem
4. Turn the solution of the easy problem into a solution to the hard problem

It’s not a direct analogy, but it’s the same technique. To paraphrase the mathematical proverb, “A trivial problem is one that has already been solved.” Finding problems and solutions in the narrative of Scripture gives way to solutions to problems in our lives. The connection of the Scripture stories to our life stories could be called by a number of names: incarnation, inspiration or mediation. Whichever term we go with, moving between this earthly realm and the heavenly realm is for the Christian as trivial as a Laplace transform for the mathematician.

Preaching & mashups

Right now I’m listening to DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, his excellent and artful blending of the Beatles’s The White Album and Jay Z’s The Black Album. The mashup whether musical, visual or in another medium takes multiple sources and blends them so that the resulting product appears entirely to be a single, seamless source.

Danger Mouse produced The Grey Album in 2004 and most other works or applications considered mashups are 21st century inventions. However, the mashup has a series of Christian antecedents.

Karl Barth gave Reformed theologians license for mashups far before Web 2.0:

“take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.” (Time magazine, 1963)

In this view, the best of Christian preaching is the mashup of the newspaper and the Bible. It should be the perfect blending of the secular and the sacred in a creative and artful endeavor. Preaching either without the world or preaching without the Word is heresy.

The mixture of sacred and secular is itself the Christmas miracle: the Incarnation of Christ. Putting together human and divine natures into one person, Jesus Christ, we see how Jesus is called the Word of God and how also Reformed theologians say that preaching the Word of God is itself the Word of God.

The mashup is an audiovisual incarnation, an artistic miracle that bears witness to the message of Christmas.