I was very intrigued by Kirby Ferguson and went further than his TED talk and found his youtube channel where he had a mini-series of videos he called "Everything is a Remix." They were all fantastic and so interesting to see. Like in his TED talk, he picks apart artists, movies, inventions, technology, everything to show that everything is a remake of something else. He exposes Star Wars basing everything off of older sci-fi flicks and western films literally play by play.
I was interested in his Apple bit where he specifically shows the things Steve Jobs ripped off of the first Xerox computer model. But even though he ripped off certain things, he still put his own ideas into the first Apple desktop and it made a killing, evolving into the company it is today.
Here was my favorite part of the series:
I agree with Lawrence Lessig in the sense that copyright laws now a days are terrifying. We are a society built on copies of copies. Some of our most celebrated creators borrowed, stole, and transformed their products to create products and music we love today. Only now people are greedy enough to create laws to protect their own copies of another copy.
The second video is really neat. When I watched the Colbert interview, and he starting writing on Lessig's book then said he didn't want people to touch his stuff (of course this was his challenge), my instant thought was ..hypocrite. Then I realized it was a joke, and like he said the system is working to his advantage. Then you have someone like Steve Jobs who says he "shamelessly" steals great ideas, but wanted to go after others who try to copy him. It's a crazy concept, but something you risk when you are the first to go public. There is no way there will ever be one person or one company doing something. There will always be competition.
ReplyDeleteMorrrrrrrrrk,
ReplyDeleteI related to Ferguson big time. His ideas about music were what I synched up with the most. As a musician, I remember some of the first songs the band I was in wrote. We were excited to create stuff that sounded like whichever band we were into at the time. The songs were still uniquely our own, but anyone who was familiar with bands like NOFX and Propaghandi and Screeching Weasel could pick out subtle parts of their sound that we were influenced by and put our own spin on.
"Remixing" is how my musical mind works. If I go too long without finding new music to listen to, my creative juices dry up. I'm not content with staying in one place, musically, and I think the same can be said of any great musician out there. It's friggen collective, dude. I don't think of it as stealing someones ideas. Listening to an album and being influenced by it in songwriting is like eating good nutritious food so your body can run clean and feel good and do good work.
Amiright?
Hi,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your views this week regarding everything is a remix, I was also intrigued by Kirby Ferguson and found the video interview very interesting, and I now feel as though everything is a remix or we are all copying someone in a sense, giving me a different perspective on the whole copyright law. I didn't know he had a mini series of videos on YouTube so I will have to go check those out.