Articles For Week 3
Internet age redefines plagiarism
http://www.wesleyanargus.com/article/5890
Monica Achitoff-Gray writes about a lecture by Professor Emily Apter of New York University’s Frech Department. The lecture, entitled “Properties of Translation: Signature, Copyright, Textual Ownership,” was about copyright in it’s new playing field. She spoke to say that copying was in itself a form of translation. The current nature of copyright law, and the current mindset is wrong. The mindset must be revaluated, to learn if the system should help people make money, or spur creativity. She questions if it is legitimate to “own” language or experience, if origionality even exists within the bounds of these fields. She deepened the discussion by adding what relates to this class, that being imperial plagerism, the act of pulling art and culture from indigenous people and incorporating them into western society and reproducing them without giving credit where credit is due. She says that with new technology changing the way people see things, common practices made possible by the internet such as sampling need to “enter the legal sphere”
This relates very strongly to the topic of sampling we discussed in class. Apter touches on something called Imperial Plagerism which is happening now when music created by others outside of America by less developed nations is brought in and copyrighted to a different owner, and rather than paying the creator, the copyright goes only to the one who stole it. It seems as though record companies who take such action should follow their own rhetoric and laws about theft.
cut and paste personality
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120303234117369959-IyjCre1ifB3Y_3yg62KaPPlCyx8_20080315.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top
Jennifer Saranow writes on a social networking plight. Users are stealing eachother’s identities, not to take their money, but to take your interests and use them to score dates. According to her, plagiarism of profiles is running rampant with hundreds of complaints over all sorts of social networks. Saranow reports that everything from small statements to entire profile pages, backgrounds and music included, are often completely copied. The people doing the copying are looking to be people who they are not. They steal phrases and personalities of people who are cool, and mirror them as their own. Although there doesn’t seem to be much catastrophic monitary loss at this point, the dates are becoming more confusing as people are not who they say they are online. The copyright issues this presents. Services who professionally write profiles for online daters are being hurt as one says that the profile they put up to be used as a guide to paying members simply has text copied straight from it illegally.
This opens up a number of doors already described in lecture and in the McLeod reading. A brand spanking new culture of intertextuality is born on these profile pages. Copying each other to attract a mate has it’s issues, especially if the one you attracted discovers you stole portions of a profile from a friend of their’s which happened to one of the people Saranow wrote on. Competition for a date probably isn’t that much different than the competition for money or popularity in the music industry. It is impossible to guess if the law will find a way to clamp down on profile plagerism as it has on music and more professionally produced works like Martin Luther King’s speeches and writings.
inspiration without perspiration
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/253
M. Zachary Johnson writes about modern classical composer Billy Joel. Billy Joel says he writes from inspiration, and does not try to limit his creative process by being analytical about it. This appears to have some negative consiquences in his piece Invention. Invention contains many musical inventions, but many not his own. In the music he plays verbatim segments from Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin. These composers are famous, and part of any pianists training repitoire. This means that Billy Joel’s creativity is more likely remembering the music he was brought up playing and reproducing it. Ayn Rand’s explination is that “Bad art is, predominantly, the product of imitation, of second hand copying, not of creative expression.”
Joel, at least in his words, although he is aware of the mimicry, says that it is not intentional and still very legitimate regardless of the many composers he draws from. In lecture, we talked about digital sampling and it’s intertextuality, but now can this dialogue be expanded to cover “inspired” regurgitation of copyrighted works? I don’t think there is a Beethoven fund that collects every time the music is copied, but what if this was a modern song that he took “inspiration” from? Whats covered, how many notes does it take to copy a ‘sound’.