Remix
OBJECTIVES
- Become acquainted with copyright as a historic, cultural and economic paradigm and its value and pertinence to creative works.
- Evaluate the meanings of real and fake and examine their intersection with personal and cultural identity and authenticity.
ORIGINAL POST
Remix Discussion
The overall TED talk “Laws that Choke Creativity” was fairly interesting. Lawrence Lessig talked mainly about three stories. However, I was drawn away by the last story when he started showing the second remix video where Jesus was dancing on the street with barely any cloth on. Jesus was lip singing to a very famous song. He focused on a very important issue in today’s society which is copyright. Most of us have access to the internet and it had become very easy and common to use other people’s work and re-make it into their own work. It touches on a serious problem of copyright. As he mentioned in the video, the important part is not about technique, but about the idea or the way people using the source. New generation and young kids have their own way to see the world, and the old law of copyright would limit new ideas. But I personally think that remix is just something funny, and it does not show a lot of creativities. The law of copyright has its own value of protecting people’s work, so I think remix shouldn’t affect the power of copyright.
REFLECTION
While it is easier and easier for people to upload, download, create, and share stuff online nowadays, copyright becomes a very serious issue. People’s awareness of copyright increases during decades, and copyright law is trying to protect the rights of authors and supporters. It is clear that we cannot take someone else’s work and use it without notice, but the form of remix makes the line fuzzy. It is kind of thing that remixed the original work by adding some effects or recreate it. Like Lawrence Lessig talked in his presentation “Laws that Choke Creativity” on TED, most of remixes are trying to bring funny or interesting effect to people. However, the problem is that whether remixing stuff break the law of copyright. Like I mentioned in my post, nothing is absolutely right or wrong. If the main purpose of copyright law is to protect the idea and the creativity of the author, recreate it means another idea but it is added on the original work. Thus, it is very hard to determine what kind of role does copyright law play towards creative works.
I think this is partly due to the fast speed improvement of technology, which I discussed in my previous artifact Technology page. Lessig uses blogs as an example. “Blogs are valuable because they give millions the opportunity to express their ideas in writing” (Lessig, 2008). Similar to remix, it increases the creativity and opportunity to express ideas in a different way. So if we decide that remix is breaking the law of copyright, we are killing new ideas.
In terms of real and fake, I don’t think remix is original means real and remix equals fake. We can’t say original one must better than remix or recreated one, and in fact many of remix version of music is better than original piece. So personally, I encourage people to explore ideas and recreate different version if they have good ideas. Everyone could like or dislike it, but the exist of remix means more opportunities.
Bibliography:
Laws That Choke Creativity: Lawrence Lessig on TED.com
FUTURE
I was not a huge fan of remix music before, and I kind of starting to like some of them after taking this class. Remixes are not always noisy, they actually have some good versions. I think in the future, I would listen more while consider the problem of copyright and the terms of real and fake.
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Table of Contents
· What is Art?
· Food As Art
· Adornment
· Horror
· Creative Spirituality
· Technology
· Remix
· Public Art
· Bibliography
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