Times Article Excerpt:
“Who owns the words?� Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.�
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons.
In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists� to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.�
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Sounds pretty communist to me – How do creators get rewarded for their work?
With new media pillaging old media sources for content through copying and mashups, and personality-driven news trumping ideas-based content, with loud opinion getting more attention than facts, where are we headed as a sentient species?
