Plagiarism and Cannibalism Both Natural and Necessary, say Writers and Musicians
March 7th, 2007 | Posted in blog 7 Comments »
In a podcast on plagiarism by Public Radio International, Jonathan Lethem interviews Jim
Fleming, a writer, and Paul Miller, a musician, about their thoughts on the controversial practice of reusing others’ content without the owners’ consent. They refer to plagiarism as recycling what’s been done before, “cannibalizing” it and creating something new that is composed of the old. Fleming quotes Mary Shelley:
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
In other words, writers don’t create content from nothing. They take the chaos of life, fragments here and there, sound bytes, characters, events, ideas, which all swirl in randomness without order. They shape it into a form. In this sense, the writer is “plagiarizing” because he or she isn’t creating something entirely new. The writer is repurposing existing content.
This repurposing is more apparent with remixed music. You take a sound here, a riff there, and you remix and reuse it in a new way. Are you plagiarizing the former? Or are you giving the content new life? A great example of this remixing is with the pilotless drone riff, which was initially a listener comment, but was remixed into an urban sound. Miller even says humans are plagiarized because we’re recycled DNA.
Plagiarism is probably too strong a word to describe the phenomenon of reuse they’re talking about. They’re not discussing blatant copying of the original and reproducing it without adding anything to it. They’re exploring the idea that nothing is original. Everything builds on previous ideas, structures, methods, stories, concepts.
Essentially everything in life that enters into our mind changes us; it works through us and comes out different. We are often unconscious of the reuse. We naturally imitate the style of authors we read, plagiarizing their structure. We build upon ideas that strike us as well-founded, and the ideas become so ingrained in our perspective that we don’t realize the original source was not within ourselves. We are socially constructed. Admitting this makes embracing Web 2.0—where content contributed by myriad authors builds upon each other, and the idea of originality swirls in a fuzzy cloud—more natural. Could this be any truer than with blogs?
I would argue that the more material is recycled and built upon, the better your content. If you write without regard to what’s been done, without knowledge of your past, you write under a veil of ignorance.
Web 2.0 might be defined as user-powered content. We are not static readers of information. We comment, we post, we podcast, we make mashups, we quote and build upon it, we take what was originally a simple concept and layer it with new meaning and depth. Like the Bakhtin’s concept of diaglossia, it is the mixing of tongues and voices that creates appeal and energy.
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About a year ago I blogged about a similar topic.
I used to compose music on my computer that allowed me to play sounds at different pitches with varying volumes and effects and arrange them into patterns. These sounds were often ripped messily from CD albums or liberally borrowed directly from other artists’ music (the music formats I used are open source). Although the melodic compositions were my own, the instruments and samples I used were usually copied verbatim from commercial source material.
I’d never call the instrumental samples my own, but the arrangement is mine absolutely. Today the public would probably call this a (…sigh…) mashup, but the law might call it plagiarism or similar. The intangible boundary between misappropriating and assimilating is clearer in spirit than in reality.
Here’s the link to the original post. Kindly pardon my loose arguments and unsubstantiated (but accurate) Conservative bashing.
http://blog.demodulated.com/2006/04/17/i-get-played-celine-gets-paid/
“Essentially everything in life that enters into our mind changes us; it works through us and comes out different.”
Demodulate!
Hi Tom
This is sort of a drive-by comment, ’cause I’m in a hurry today. Creative Commons is what popped into my mind when I read your blog (haven’t heard the podcast yet.)
CC is a way to mark creative work so all can see how you want to share it – freely, restricted, etc. Read about CC here: http://creativecommons.org/
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the School’s Center for Internet and Society. In 2002, he was named one of 50 top innovators by Scientific American. He is on the board and a staff member for CC. A couple of videos with Lawrence Lessig discussing creative commons:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWxyx5iYdvI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlCsqCOOqsM (intro to this one is in Danish, followed by an example of creativity by a Swedish art group, and then the interview with LL – in English.
More on Lessig on his blog:
http://www.lessig.org/blog/
This is a great film, not fully on topic, but it covers some of this CC stuff – and it is under CC, so it is a “live” example.
http://www.foureyedmonsters.com/neutrality/
Finally, a brilliant example of communicating dry, serious material in a creative way:
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/
I think Kathy Sierra would be proud! This link covers the fine line between fair use and copyright infringement.
With all these links, I hope Akismet doesn’t mark me as a baddy!
Happy reading.
Karen’s comment reminded me of a fascinating interview by Mark Hosler of the band Negativland. The music and video this band produces are composed 100% of snippets from movies, speeches, songs, and other media. When queried about Creative Commons he says it’s a start, but that it’s unreasonable for anyone producing “mass media” to expect to control it. He is a proponent of caveat-free openness and availability of all publicly accessible media, and I must say that he convinced me rather thoroughly.
http://www.mnstories.com/archives/2006/05/negativlands_ma.html
I seem to recall, when setting up WordPress for my blog, choosing a Creative Commons license for my content. I believe I permitted free use of my content, including derivative works and verbatim quotes, provided my name is credited with authorship. There’s not much I can do beyond that to legally protect my work, but maybe I’m in the minority for not really caring that much. Perhaps I have Negativland to thank for that.
Hey, I’m listening to one of your remixes right now. I’m pretty impressed. I didn’t now you were a remix artist and DJ. With your knowledge of the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association), I’m assuming you’re also located in Canada (you may have told me that before, but I forgot)? I see you also have a Utah Rave video, where helicopters and military come in and attack people using dogs. Wow, you have a lot of original music there. That’s a whole dimension about you that I was completely unaware of.
Karen, thanks for the links. I have heard of Lawrence Lessig and at one time subscribed to his blog. The whole digital rights management (DRM) issue is really coming to occupy center stage. I haven’t actually marked my site with a creative commons license, in part because I assumed anything I publish I own rights too. However, it’s never been an issue, and I’d be honored if someone liked my content enough to try stealing it. One area I’m unsure about is the use of images. Like the image of the sand-face in this post. I pulled it off another site, linking to the site with the image. Is that allowed?
I prefer to consider myself a composer more than a remixer since the majority of my productions are original compositions, though some are reinterpretations or collaborative works. 2007 is the tenth anniversary of the last song I wrote so whatever creative title I give myself is simply milking my creativity from a prior chapter of my life.
I do DJ now and again but it’s tough to find a considerate time to do so when you live in an apartment building. Besides, DJing is for people who are too lazy to write music. I enjoy it very much but it’s not as rewarding as composing.
I live in Toronto, by the way.
Sorry about that. Yes, you are definitely a composer. I didn’t know if there was a specific term for composers that sometimes do remixes. It wasn’t the right word to describe artistic work. You are a composer and a demodulator.
Tom