The Age of the Remix

A dialogue:

Tommy: Can there be plagiarism in the Digital Age? 

Cole: Yes, of course, what a stupid question. 

Tommy: Ah, but can the opposite extreme exist?

Cole: You mean a work completely derived from community?  An open-source project?

Tommy: Yes, like Wikipedia, but in the context of art.

Cole:  Certainly, and I can give you an example.  The Loose Cannon of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a collection of stories written and edited by members of the fake-church's forum, is filled with instances that would have been considered plagiarism in a previous era.  People copy/paste, reference, and mantain a general ambiance by copying the moods of the previous stories, and editing others to resemble their own.  The final product, though unlikely to be found in the New York Times Bestseller list, is nevertheless an excellent read, and thought it was made with constant copying from various sources, no one can accuse it of containing plagiarism.

Tommy: Take a breath, there.

Cole: Yeah.

Tommy: So what about Helene Hegemann?

Cole:  That chick with the book filled with passages she lifted from another author?

Tommy: Is she a plagiarist?

Cole: Absolutely.

Tommy: Now, hold on a minute, she's made a new work by 'remixing' a previous one, just like you said the FSM forum members did.

Cole:  There's no remixing in her work.  It just fits around the already constructed pieces she copy/pastes.

Tommy: But blatant borrowing has been a foundation of culture since man first took up pen and paintbrush, long before Terence complained in the second century B.C. that “there’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.” Appropriation has breathed life into music, art and theater, he argues, and he lines up a kind of murderers’ row of writers, including Sterne, Emerson, Eliot and Joyce (“I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man”) to make the case that it has been an important tradition in writing, too.

Cole: You stole that from the article.

Tommy:  ...no I didn't.  I used it to make my point, thus reworking it into a new argument, a new context, and making it my own.

Cole: No, you didn't, you ripped it off.  Is there no way to make you see this?

Tommy:  We could have a duel to the death.

Tommy and Cole have a duel to the death.  Cole dies.  Everyone in DMA is very sad.  The end.