"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do."
“Copyright warning” included in in Woody Guthrie’s recordings from the early 1940s (source)
There is much to love about the story of the fake Apple store:
For one, the sheer boldness with which these people simply went and recreated an entire Apple store. The level of detail they went to in order to replicate an almost perfect experience. The fact that they managed to not only make the customers, but the employees themselves believe it was the real thing. They even referred their customers to other, real Apple stores1 when something wasn’t in stock! What a beautiful example of the increasing blurriness between original and copy; the genuine article and its imitation.
My previous blog post about imitation, individuality, and identity looked at the history and philosophy of copying as a fundamental part of creativity and being human.
“But what about the artists, who should be paid for their efforts?”, the copyright-holders (who often are not at all the same as said artists) ask indignantly.
Regardless of where you stand in this debate, one thing is clear: The internet is a giant copy machine, and it is, and will continue to be, used for that purpose. This is not going to change. Moreover, copying isn’t limited any more to just digital files.
If I wanted to build my own Apple retail store, I would start with an image search (156,000 results on Flickr, over 20.4 million on Google Images) and go from there. And it’s just a matter of time before 3D scanners and printers can do what’s envisioned in Makers, where any object can be captured, adjusted as necessary, and recreated in minutes.
Does this mean that creators have to resign themselves to having all their work stolen and never making any money unless they retrain as IP lawyers?
Not at all.
A couple of months ago, we learned that in the US Netflix’ paid movie streaming service now accounts for more bandwidth than BitTorrent, meaning that “perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is [paid] content.”
And last week, a report revealed that users of pirate sites such as the recently shut-down kino.to also spend more on movies in theatres and on DVD. Similar reports have come out showing that music pirates buy more digital music than the average music consumer.
So here is my advice for people who would like to make money from their work:
And remember: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
(1) “Do you have a Web camera for my MacBook?” asked one customer. “No, but our other store in Lujiazui should have it,” said the sales representative, referring to Apple’s genuine retail store in the heart of Shanghai’s financial district.” (Quoted from the above-linked Reuters article found on stuff.co.nz)
(2) I can’t believe I made a baseball reference. This has to be the first time ever. Although technically, it’s a “movie about baseball” reference. A movie I haven’t seen. And won’t have to, thanks to Wikipedia.
(3) New Zealand is feeling this particularly badly, because a lot of content from overseas is simply not available here, or only years after it aired in its original country. And it’s not just movies and TV shows: When I moved here, I cancelled my paid Audible account because none of the audio books I was interested in were available “in my region” once I didn’t have a US-credit card any more.
(4) There are a lot more than the two I linked to - they simply came to mind first.
(5) Point in case: One of the fake Apple Store’s customers is quoted saying, “The prices are the same as the real store but the service is better here.”
(6) As this cartoon poignantly states, “the more similar the copy and the original, the more important it is for one to be real and the other to be fake, pinning their marketplace values on the theoretical existence of authenticity in a consumer culture.” Read the whole thing - it’s actually really funny. Cos it’s true.
Good morning. How are you? I’m Dr. Worm.
I’m interested in things.
I’m not a real doctor, but
I am a real worm
-They Might Be Giants, Doctor Worm
Academic titles are big deal in Germany. Unfortunately, it appears that not everyone who holds one also deserves it. Over the past 6 months or so, a number of politicians and other prominent figures had their doctorates revoked by their universities when it came out that they had plagiarised large portions of their theses. The most prominent case was that of up-and-coming political star and Minister of Defence, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, whose dissertation turned out to contain well over a thousand instances of unattributed passages on almost every page of the text.
So, a politician was caught lying. Why is that interesting? It’s interesting because of the way he was caught. It wasn’t his university that realised the problem or went to find proof. Instead, once the first suspicions became public, Guttenberg’s thesis was analysed extremely thoroughly through crowd-sourcing, on a wiki platform dubbed “GuttenPlag” where anyone could contribute.
Many did. The GuttenPlag wiki quickly reached 2 million page views per day and had thousands of active contributors. Media attention was enormous, and Guttenberg didn’t just have to surrender his academic title, but also resign from his political offices. The wiki won the prestigious Grimme Online Award for its “journalistic impact and innovation.”
Similar web-based collaborative efforts have sprung up since, most notably Vroniplag.
None of this would have been possible without the power of the internet. Anyone was able to join in, compare portions from a pool of large amounts of text, collaborate with others, and share their findings. Moreover, the collaborative nature of the net - the network effect, if you will - made it possible to not only accomplish a big task very quickly, but get people excited and rallying behind the cause.
“Isn’t it ironic”, said many mainstream media outlets in response to the Guttenberg affair. “Those same internet people who want everything for free, steal music and movies as they please, and vote for the Pirate Party all of a sudden care about copyright? Isn’t that applying double-standards?”1
I really don’t think.
Guttenberg and the rest of the lot took someone else’s work (or more precisely, a large number of other people’s works) and pretended it was their own. That’s not generally the case with people who share or download content. They may simply want to consume it (listen, view, read), or maybe use it to create something new on its basis (remix, mash up, extend.)
The line between plagiarism and creative adaptation is of course blurry, and it has been long before the internet - one of the best examples is Led Zeppelin’s debut album, as poignantly described in Everything is a Remix. What has changed since 1969 is the technology. Now we have this giant copying machine called the internet, and it’s not going to go away. ”Copying, imitating, duplicating, even faking, are not aberrations, but a fundamental part of what it means to be human,” I wrote in a previous blog post. Technology just makes this process easier.
“Policy making is continuing as if there was no internet”, Lawrence Lessig said at Internet New Zealand’s recent Nethui conference.2 And this, I think, is fundamentally the problem, and the clue for the answer. The internet provides the platform for a new culture, a culture that has shifted from one-way dissemination of information to two-way creative interactions.
It’s not a question if we want this to happen or not - it already has. We can ignore it and pretend we can just continue as we have (as the increasingly outlandish attempts to protect certain corporate interests demonstrate.) Or we can choose to work with it, and find ways to responsibly act, communicate, and create within this new reality. A good first step would be to stop referring to “the internet community,” as if it was a strange cult. It’s 2011.
We are the internet. Some of us just may not know it yet.
(0) Punk rock fans will recognise that the this article’s title is a reference to a line in the song Franco Un-American from the NOFX album War on Errorism.
(1) Not an actual quote, but very much paraphrased.
(2) The full-length video of Lessig’s Nethui keynote is worth watching.
"Knowledge would advance more quickly if new findings were discussed openly and published for all to read. Thinkers would inspire one another, and ideas would bread and multiply […] ideas were not like gold, but ‘like torches, that in the lighting of others do not waste themselves.’ With ideas as with flames, in fact, to share meant to create light."
Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (2011), page 67
About Robert Boyle and the Royal Society’s new approach to openly discussing and publishing knowledge, rather than keeping it secret as had been the practice.
Our poetry now
is the realisation that we possess nothing
anything therefore is a delight
(since we do not possess it)
and thus need not fear its loss
We need not destroy the past; it is gone
at any moment, it might reappear and seem to be and be the present
Would it be a repetition? Only if we thought we
owned it, but since we don’t, it is free and so are we.
John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, 1949
This post has been inspired by a number of different books, articles, sleepless-night-brooding and wine-fuelled conversations. It’s probably way too long as it is, but it still feels as if it’s barely scratching the surface of what I’m trying to get at. Anyway, it’s a start. Heimatseeker is back! Today, we’re talking about imitation, individuality, and identity.
Imitation
We copy all the time, and we always have. Copying, imitating, duplicating, even faking, are not aberrations, but a fundamental part of what it means to be human.
This, in a nutshell, is the central point in Marcus Boon’s thought-provoking book, In Praise of Copying.1 The book, which has been the main inspiration for this post, explores the history, social impact, and ethics of copying. The author takes the reader on a journey that starts all the way back with Plato and his concept of mimesis: the imitation, but also representation of an object whose outward appearance indicates its essence. In other words, according to Plato, the physical manifestation of an object and its underlying idea correspond to each other and therefore make it original, “real”, whereas a copy of the object distorts that relationship.
Sound familiar? It should, as today’s IP and copyright laws are based on Platonic concepts of transcendent essence: They protect not the idea itself (which arguably cannot be owned), but the fixed, material expression of an idea.
And, as we all know, today’s IP and copyright laws are not working all that well any more. No, this isn’t simply about “piracy.” Rather, in the nearly 2500 years since Plato, we’ve come away from the the notion of objects having a “transcendent essence.” Contemporary theory, says Boon (and this makes sense to me,) takes a very different view and assumes that everything is essenceless (by the way, also a key concept in Buddhism), everything is empty, and only gains its meaning through context, in a relative, dependent fashion.
Put it another way: If individual objects really had their own essence, it would be impossible to copy them.
And yet, the practice of copying, or imitation, has been fundamental throughout history, and the line between imitation and outright forgery has always been a blurry one. “Dubious orations and plays”2 were prevalent in Athens of 400 B.C. The art of rhetoric has always been based on continuation and repetition of a tradition, albeit in a thoughtful, creative way that goes well beyond pure imitation. Rembrandt’s 17th century workshop employed a large number of pupils who eagerly imitated the master’s style, making it difficult to tell whether a painting was a “genuine Rembrandt.” Finally, in the 20th century, modern art (think Warhol, Fluxus, or the Beat poets, for example) went as far as elevating the copy to something more original than the original itself, “precisely because it made explicit its own dependence on other things, signs, or matters3.”
This is important because it sets the scene for the debate: Copying is not about stealing or mindless duplication. It’s about the creation of new things, based on what exists already. It’s a creative process that is essential to what it means to be human. We fill things with meaning by putting them in context.
Innovation, Boon argues, come from combining existing things in new ways, for example, sampling in Hip Hop. This gives us a framework that allows new forms to emerge, while still retaining the history of the elements that make up the new thing. Just as children learn by imitation and role play, as humans in general, we find joy in the transformation of existing things into new ones through copying4.
Individuality
But enough copying from someone else’s book! As I was reading it, I began wondering if and how these concepts might apply to not just things and ideas, but also people. If copying, imitation even, is what makes me human, then who am I? What is my own essence? What makes me authentic? Am I even real?
How do we humans reconcile our need to belong and be part of a bigger something, our wish for permanence and security, with our desire to stand out, to be special, and different?
And how can anyone be original in today’s world where everything appears to have been done already? Whatever brilliant new idea I might come up with, I can be pretty certain the domain name’s been taken and there are at least 100,000 Google results for the search term.
Maybe the now classic demotivational poster about individuality is right: We are “unique, just like everybody else.” That’s funny. It’s also quite profound, as good humour often is.
If we believe that we, too, are inherently without essence, then we, too, gain meaning through context and relationships. And that context is much less fixed today than it was for previous generations:
When my parents grew up, their life path was pretty clearly laid out to them. Where they lived, what they did, who they met, how their lives played out was driven by external factors (money, or lack thereof, being the most influential one.) Their choices were limited, but so were those of their friends, colleagues, and neighbours, and they all made the best of it. Our generation, on the other hand, is faced with virtually unlimited possibilities, and every choice we make for something is at the same time a choice against an large number of other options.
In other words: Our lack of essence gives us the ultimate freedom to create the selves we want to be, but also fear of making the wrong choice, of missing something. No one is going to tell us what’s right, or real, so we go and find things to copy. Social media are a good example, because they enable just the kind of “mass individualism” that allow us to be unique like everybody else. We can be clever and original, and at the same time, find a safe place within our network of connections that shares our interests and attitudes and validates our choices by copying them again.
In The race for attention on owni.eu, the author goes as far as arguing that “the desire to stand out in our urban universe is fostering a narcissistic society, which makes it difficult to have genuine social relationships.” He sees a deep shift from the need of survival, which has characterised human endeavours for most of our history, to “the necessity to stand out from the crowd” in modern societies, the need to prove that “we have value as an object of social and cultural consumption.”
I’m not that pessimistic, although I can see where the author is coming from. Is the curse of our unlimited freedom that we don’t compete for limited resources any more, but for our 15 minutes of fame? And as I’m busy working on my interestingness, is the individual who emerges the “real” me, or a persona I create in search of the fragile balance between fitting in and standing out?
Identity
Wrong question. If everything is created, then a distinction between different layers of reality doesn’t make a lot of sense. Everything simply is, and we fill it with meaning. Real is what we make real.
The ego is what tends to get into the way here. It’s the manifestation of our fears: Not being interesting, Not fitting in. Not being good enough. Missing out. Being the same old. Being different.
What if we could let go of all of the need to control all of that? What if, instead, we could embrace the freedom and choice we have, and get creative?
Just like our brains have quadrillions of possible neuronal connections, so does the world out there (both “real” and virtual, if that distinction still makes any sense at all these days) offer basically endless possibilities. Consciously or not, we consistently transform ourselves and collect experiences and grow our networks. We connect with people and ideas, and we find inspiration in many places.
So here’s my answer: Let’s take all these inspirations, let’s copy them and transform them, play with them and destroy them, and then recreate something new out of it, and through that process, make our world, and make ourselves. Let’s stop worrying about missing something, and just put things out there, and see where they take us5.
Because creativity is not a limited resource. We don’t have to compete for originality. Just as with love, the more you give, the more of it exists. By simply being who we are, we increase the number of interesting possibilities in the world.
Put another way:
Copy out of love, not fear. It’s not about being different. It’s about being real6.
(1) As is appropriate for a book with this subject, In Praise of Copying is available as a Creative Commons-licensed free PDF download. For a number of reasons, I decided to buy the hard cover book anyway - but that’s a topic for another post.
(2) In Praise of Copying, p115.
(3) In Praise of Copying, p49.
(4) While I’m writing this, I’m listening to the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”. Anyone wondering about why creative copying would make the world a better place should listen to this song. And the original, of course.
(5) And yes, it’s equally exciting and terrifying to start blogging again after more than half a decade. You all might think this article is stupid. And yet, here it is.
(6) What could be a more appropriate post script to a post about copying, than the copy of some song lyrics (by Lilly Allen, Take What You Take, 2006):
Say what you say, do what you do
Feel what you feel, as long as it’s real.
Take what you take and give what you give
Just be what you want, just as long as it’s real.
