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Guy Debord

Basis for a Defense in a Possible Lawsuit for Plagiarism

(Film: The Society of the Spectacle)

1. Arguments of the production.

The producer, unlike a great number of merchants of the cinema, has proclaimed
right of his absolute respect for artistic liberty. He is engaged in it by
contract with the author. He must thus furnish to the author all that he judges
useful for the realization of his film. The producer, considering himself to be
morally obligated, has done the best that he could do, and by moving most
urgently so as to satisfy the demands of the author.

It is to this producer that one, putting aside all recourse to the amiable,
comes to bring several pecuniary demands that correspond to a de facto
censorship. The producer, as he has already affirmed, is completely ready to pay
the rights for the sequences on litigation, now that he has accomplished this
engagement with the author. He can not, however, submit to preliminary private
censors or to diverse dilatory proceedings capable of hindering the realization
of the film, by falsifying the intellectual and artistic meanings.

The producer obviously admits the obligation to pay the ordinary rights; but not
the supervisions and authorizations that, under the circumstances, are rendered
obsolete by a new manner of conceiving cinematographic writing. With the current
film, the cinema ascends to the level of independence of theoretical expression
that has been known for centuries by the book; thus, such a practice must deeply
involve a new legitimacy of the right to quotation -- and the proper legal
definition of this right.

2. Arguments of the author.

In the work in question, the author treats modern society in its totality, which
leads him -- and singularly from the fact that he uses here the cinematographic
mode of communication -- to treat the cinema itself. In any case, he doesn't
intend to justify to anyone the particular points that appear necessary to him
to approach in this work, not to the possessors of the rights to any of the
films that exist until now, nor to any kind of tribunal.

The current world has been transcribed so much into images that, today, one can
find everywhere at least two kinds of owners: one who holds the actual ownership
and another who posses the rights to the images that have been shot. And so this
world paradoxically risks becoming invisible if one or both of these [types] of
owners adds to the simple, cashable rights of reproduction the right to look and
censor, which will quickly prevent the showing of this world, in each of its
details and thus in its totality, in a manner that is not apologetic.

The prohibition of the re-use in whole or in part of existing images -- in a
epoch that claims to give an eminent place to the very culture that is so
cruelly lacking -- will amount to withdrawing from the artist the right to quote
and the right to place pre-existing cultural data back into play; to withdrawing
from the critique of the "spectacular society" the right to show what it speaks
of.

Furthermore, the author does not claim a privileged status that would be
recognized as that of an "artist." The critique of the spectacle is also a
critique of art. But art, so as to be critiqued and superseded, at first has the
need to be free. This has been the basis of its legal status, for centuries, in
the bourgeois democracies. The question now is thus to know if the cinema is in
some way an art, as claimed by current society. Or if it only belongs to the
industrialists and police officers.

(Supplementary argument, in case several individuals complain about appearing in
the film without their authorization.)

The author does not envision critiquing this or that detail of our epoch, a
unionist or a star, but the generality of this epoch -- before which the details
are indifferent. He has taken one or another of these details as a function of
its accessibility, thus of the success of its spectacular distribution. Finally,
it is rather an honor to appear in this film, which will carry off diverse
passing figures from this epoch in the historic duration.

3. Arguments of the author and the producer in case of a complaint made by the
owners of the Russian films.

One knows well that the constant practice of post-Czarist Russia, despite a
recent and fallacious international agreement on the rights of authors, was to
not recognize any rights of the foreign works that it didn't prohibit from
distribution within its borders. All intellectual and artistic expression is,
from the economic point of view, controlled and possessed by the State. Today
this State still can directly take seize the literary rights of opposition
intellectuals who publish abroad. Thus, to agree to recognize any right for the
use of the films produced in Russia would be to be complicit with this
oppression. There are no author's rights in Russia; there are only the ownership
rights of the totalitarian bureaucracy. In three words, whatever the
consequences, our response would be, "Not a penny."

The complaints that are addressed to us can only have one meaning: the claim to
export a political censorship, vexed by seeing several sequences of the history
of the defeated proletarian revolution, falsified in the Russian versions, are
re-used in their truth. To this surprising, political and economic indecency,
one adds another unacceptable motif:

Inasmuch as it is notorious that a number of Russian writers and artists who
contest -- even very moderately -- the society that is called soviet are
currently locked up, even at this moment, in psychiatric asylums, the author of
this film, who is more radically contestatory, obviously finds himself in a
state of insanity from the point of view of the Russian government.
Consequently, all complaints, direct or indirect, from the agents of this
government will not be rightfully founded here ("There is neither crime nor
offense," stipulates our Penal Code in cases of insanity, and the Civil Code has
made the notion precise, in Article 489: "Even when this state presents lucid
intervals").

(Letter to Gerard Lebovici, November 13, 1973)

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