As I read through Larwence Lessig’s Remix, I couldn’t help but think of Lessig as a “Robin Hood for the common digital man.” He pleads for the creative freedoms of regular people, very much like you and me. He uses examples of the band Girl Talk, which creates something new out of the pre-existing creations of other musicians. Just what is Lessig striving for?
He wants to protect the creative remixes that make up much of our digital age.
Now, what is a remix?
My first thought was of those songs you hear at clubs, where DJ’s use synthesizers and other computerized beats to “remix” original songs. Two particular artists come to mind for me, Cascada and Basshunter, who are both well-known and well-listened to remix artists. But, are remix artists really artists? Or are they simply glorified plagiarists?
History is filled with inventions being created out of past inspirations and concepts. Morse code turned into telephones. Telephones gave birth to cell phones. Cell phones inspired internet-based video calls.
Cascada took Savage Garden’s “Madly Truly Deeply” (a relatively mellow song) and turned into “Madly Truly Deeply” (a Best High Energy/ Euro Track nomination).
Same difference.
Lessig gets a little more technical than this. He views our current culture as “a ‘Read/Write’ (‘R/W’) culture: in Sousa’s world (a world he’d insist included all of humanity from the beginning of human civilization), ordinary citizens ‘read’ their culture by listening to it or by reading representations of it” (28). This leads in to a hands-on situation, where an individual uses what they find in a particular piece of work to inspire other works. This train of action/thought encourages young people to interact and play with existing works of art to spur the birth of something new. With this, Lessig focuses on two basic concepts throughout his entire book:
- The importance of “amateur” creativity, producing in RW culture
- The importance of limits in the reach of copyright’s regulation, leaving free from regulation this amateur creativity (33)
Lessig strives for a future that combines Hollywood (professionals) and the growing pool of artists on the Internet (amateurs).
June 19, 2009 at 12:21 am
A lot of people are up in arms over government regulations. Copyright is turning into a regulation that is strangling creativity. Artists, in trying to create new and unique works, should be open to borrowing bits and pieces of different works to help them form new works.
Fiction writers do it all the time. Playwright Edward Albee models his dramas off of the works of Samuel Beckett. Chuck Palahnuck models his transgressional fiction off of Bret Easton Ellis. This sort of homage creation needs to be looked at under a new political and economic microscope.