Copyright cant account for the multiplicities of cultural context

As I have tried to argue throughout this chapter, sampling, layering, and rhythmic ›ow/asymmetry lead hip-hop aesthetics toward ironic forms of narration and ambiguous criticisms of American culture. Intellectual property law and legal discourse, however, have historically assumed that meaning is directly correlated to the words, sounds, or images of a given text. While irony revels in ambiguity and double meanings, intellectual property law operates as if words have a distinct meaning without reference to any particular audience or cultural context. One of the primary analytical tools upon which courts have relied in copyright law is the idea/expression dichotomy.92 Thus, an author can own the expression or particularly wording of a concept, but not the concept itself, because legal discourse has determined that allowing authors to own particular articulations of an idea provides the necessary balance between innovation and property rights and between the creator and the public. This scheme functions properly as long as particular expressions denote one distinct idea. Hip-hop aesthetics challenges this assumption of copyright law because its aesthetic theory presupposes ambiguity and double meanings and carefully constructs these texts to produce these ironies through sampling, layering, and rhythmic /asymmetries. Rather than assuming that a particular text constitutes a subset or articulation of a given idea, hip-hop aesthetics turns this relationship upside down and attempts to transform a single expression into a multiplicity of ideas. For example, when Jay-Z samples from the musical Annie in his song “Hard Knock Life,” he transforms the meaning of a “hard knock life” even if copyright law required him to pay a royalty for merely copying the song. The idea/expression dichotomy breaks down when applied to hip-hop producers because their verbatim copying frequently shows how multiple ideas exist within a single expression. It is precisely this free play of ideas, which hip-hop promotes, that intellectual property law regulates and limits.