The Fact of Life: Gank and be Ganked

Radio Open Source hosted a fabulous discussion on the excesses of copyright enforcement and the creative process of appropriation and modification. They were inspired by Johnathan Lethem's brilliant essay in Harper's called "The Ecstatsy of Influence," in which he exposes creativity as a gift economy by plundering ideas and phrases right and left to make his case.

Lethem is a guest on the show along with scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, Mark Hosler of the band Negativeland (famously sued by U2's label), and one of my favorite singer songwriters, Mike Doughty who coined the slang "Gank" to describe his own appropriation.

I call this a fact of life because I see us, as a society, wrestling with how we protect and grow our creative wealth. On the one had we have grotesque extensions of copyright duration beyond anything Thomas Jefferson ever conceived of or would have recognized as beneficial to the common good. On the other hand we have a movement labeled as "Open Source" -- spanning software, music and art -- in which code, images, sound are all freely shared. Creative Commons emerged to permit creators to explicitly express the terms of their gifts.

The fact of life is that "Open Source" is simply a natural process. As Vaidhyanathan said in the show:

What we think of as open source is is basically culture. It’s how human beings have organized themselves, communicated with each other, joined each other, forged identities, and most importantly, grooved and danced, for centuries. This is basically how people have always dealt with each other. It’s just in recent years we’ve imposed these interesting cages — legal cages, psychological cages, ethical cages — around this level of sharing.

I've thinking a lot about sustainability lately. Most of the attention, as it should, is directed at the environmental side of that concept. But there are many more. Sustainability of culture is one. As the daily business news reports on increasingly consolidated media (and I am blogging on one giant's -- Google-- platform) there is not a coinciding conversation about preserving and cultivating the diverse cultural expression that helps us create and make sense of our future.

Technorati Tags: copyright, Media Reform, creative commons
Gank