Riddims against copyright

The Caribbean has long been exploited on the world stage, and copyright law is no exception

Originally published on Global Voices

By Alexis Hancock

“Oh! Bob Marley, right?” Jamaican culture has been popularised by the mainstream, and as a Jamaican-American, I often get a glimpse into how others have consumed it and from what point of view. I would not call myself an ardent Marley fan, but I know the kind of people who are most likely attached to his music outside of Jamaica — for example, the potential counterculture student of the 1970s at UCLA who found connection to his messages of resistance. 

My personal fascination with Jamaican music is the “riddim” — the Jamaican patois spelling of “rhythm” — an instrumental beat or tune constructed not for a single artist, but to be used by the collective of the time and to be both enjoyed and critiqued by the culture makers of Jamaican art: the disenfranchised masses. 

As a public interest technologist and digital rights advocate, I view the “riddim” with an open-source lens. It helped to protect Jamaican culture, particularly from Western constructs that are heavily embedded in existing power dynamics like rigid copyright laws and the corporate commodification of music.

Riddims

Dancehall’s interactive, collaborative nature doesn’t treat a work as isolated or even something that is “finished.” Iteration is a part of the creative process that is decided by the next function or party. In Larisa Kingston Mann’s “Rude Citizenship,” she outlines how copyright law was written at a time when many of the island’s people were themselves considered property under slavery, thereby creating — from the very start — a contentious relationship with those holding the society’s wealth. Copyright law was set up for those with ample resources to dictate what could be protected and who could profit.

Beat-sharing directly challenges neo-colonial copyright’s individualistic definition of ownership and originality. Traditional copyright promotes monopoly over expression, enforced by harsh legal mechanisms (such as statutory damages) that make intertextuality, reuse, and artistic experimentation legally risky. Even Sean Paul, one of the most commercially successful dancehall artists in the world, attributed his mainstream success of “Get Busy” to the Diwali Riddim. If not for this collective creativity and shared use, we would not see dancehall music evolve and get pushed to the world in the way that it has.

Collective sharing didn’t stop at just music; dance was often learned collectively as well. I used to watch “passa passa” videos in high school and college, just to learn and keep up to date with the latest dances coming out of Jamaica and New York City in the early 2000s. These parties were the bane of anyone entrenched in respectability. The clothes were outlandish, the manners “rude,” the dancehall queens nothing short of acrobatic, and the parties could go until 6:00 a.m. 

But this was also the time when new artists could get a slot, vendors could make a little money, and producers could collaborate with artists and get public consensus on what worked before dropping money at a studio.

Caribbean economics

The Caribbean has long been exploited on the world stage in many ways, and copyright law is no exception.

Jamaica was often sidelined into less than favourable international trade agreements that didn’t keep the interests of the Jamaican masses in mind. More often than not, there was a strict one-size-fits-all structure, dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank: detrimental loan structures, one-sided economic trade agreements, currency devaluation, and exploitative labour guidelines. 

In 1992, the IMF created terms that heavily impacted Jamaica’s economy. This served as the backdrop for the Jamaica Copyright Act of 1993, when the country was directed to reshape its laws to participate in global trade. More rigid terms forced artists to start registering “riddims,” and while these laws are purported to protect artists, less resourced and independent artists struggled to make claims against large producers. This also killed the “handshake agreements” many artists and producers made prior to 1993.

Modern dancehall and beyond

This hasn’t stopped dancehall creators from organising alternative circuits of commerce and performance, social intimacy, and communal engagement. Even today, the continuous nature of dancehall works still causes friction with how copyright laws function. 

This year, a monumental copyright case was overturned by a U.S. federal judge who named many famous artists in a list of 150, and affected about 2,000 tracks. The plaintiffs, Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson, claimed that the “Fish Market” riddim (also known as the “Pocoman Jam riddim”) was the basis and source of the percussion pattern that runs through reggaeton, the now billion-dollar musical genre with origins in the Spanish reggae of Panama brought by  Afro-Jamaican migrants, and further magnified by Puerto Rican artists.

However, the logic was denied. As US District Judge André Birotte Jr. said, “Plaintiffs have not clearly identified what copyrighted work contains the allegedly protectable selection and arrangement they seek to enforce.”

The claim failed to take all selections and arrangements mentioned and tie them to one work. But rather, it referenced a collection of works that mirrored parts over time: “That principle is especially significant here. Skidmore cautioned that a plaintiff cannot ‘reconstitut[e] the copyrighted work as a combination of unprotectable elements’ and then claim that those elements are substantially similar because they appear in an accused work, even where the elements are presented in ‘a different aesthetic context.’”

The nature of riddims is a double-edged sword here. Browne and Johnson were deprived of a chance to share in the profits of their creativity that set the groundwork for a whole new genre of music. If this lawsuit had gone in their favour, the logic could potentially have put any new reggaeton artist to this profit-sharing standard, possibly resulting in conditions only well-backed artists like Bad Bunny could afford to accommodate. Such an outcome could have created a disempowering dynamic for new artists. A power structure riddims fought in the first place.

We can all easily hear the main percussion in Puerto Rican reggaeton and Dominican dembow, but copyright’s ears are selectively biased against rhythm — usually favouring money, the artist’s will to attribute credit to where it’s due, and when the tracks were created in the more popular artist’s career. In fact, Black artists are often credited much later for genre-defining work and after lighter-skinned artists have made their money.

Despite the mainstream push away from collective processes, dancehall continues to evolve. What “makes Jamaicans cool” is the layers of understanding that come with what we share. Copyright creates a stamp in time — a piece of “the cool” the mainstream can manage to freeze and sell. Yet, the true cool develops alongside the collective and remains protected by that shared understanding.