[Consumers] “recode” cultural and even industrial commodities in ways that better serve their particular needs and interests, and “rework” them to express meanings different from the ones intended or preferred by their producers.

Semiotic democracy acknowledges that it is the appeal of popular culture and its universality that results in creators’ desire to appropriate and modify it. Should the law allow such recoding through some kind of transformative work exception, similar to the parody doctrine, in fair use? Should the transformative use of a popular work be given more deference than the the transformative use of an uknown work?

And as for how different a song needs to be to be considered “new,” well, that’s a tough one. It’s hard to quantify just how much difference there is between songs. Is it a particular chord progression? A rhythm? A sequence of key changes? It seems impossible to set a hard-and-fast rule, because so many songs share so many traits.

I think it’s notable that the only remixes (or mash-ups) that we’ve really discussed have taken their source material from relatively famous artists, whether the remixers themselves are obscure or already commercially successful. What happens when someone remixes a song that’s not well-known, and makes it popular? Does the remixer have some sort of claim to the profits, because they popularized it? Or can the original songwriter lay claim to their original work? How different does the remix have to be in order for it to be considerd a “new work”?

I definitely don’t have the answer to these questions – just some food for thought.