Rewindability and findability are just two Gutenberg-like transformations that moving images are undergoing. These two and many other factors of remixing apply to all newly digitized media, such as virtual reality, music, radio, presentations, and so on.
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Remixing—the rearrangement and reuse of existing pieces—plays havoc with traditional notions of property and ownership. If a melody is a piece of property you own, like your house, then my right to use it without permission or compensation is very limited. But digital bits are notoriously nontangible and nonrival, as explained earlier. Bits are closer to ideas than to real estate. As far back as 1813, Thomas Jefferson understood that ideas were not really property, or if they were property they differed from real estate. He wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today.
For the most part our legal system still runs on agrarian principles, where property is real. It has not caught up to the digital era. Not for lack of trying, but because it is difficult to sort out how ownership works in a realm where ownership is less important.
How does one “own” a melody? When you give me a melody, you still have it. Yet in what way is it even yours to begin with if it is one note different from a similar melody a thousand years old? Can one own a note? If you sell me a copy of it, what counts as a copy? What about a backup, or one that streams by? These are not esoteric theoretical questions. Music is one of the major exports of the U.S., a multibillion-dollar industry, and the dilemma of what aspect of intangible music can be owned and how it can be remixed is at the front and center of culture today.
Legal tussles over the right to sample—to remix—snippets of music, particularly when either the sampled song or the borrowing song make a lot of money, are ongoing. The appropriateness of remixing, reusing material from one news source for another is a major restraint for new journalistic media. Legal uncertainty about Google’s reuse of snippets from the books it scanned was a major reason it closed down its ambitious book scanning program (although the court belatedly ruled in Google’s favor in late 2015). Intellectual property is a slippery realm.
There are many aspects of contemporary intellectual property laws that are out of whack with the reality of how the underlying technology works. For instance, U.S. copyright law gives a temporary monopoly to a creator for his or her creation in order to encourage further creation, but the monopoly has been extended for at least 70 years after the death of the creator, long after a creator’s dead body can be motivated by anything. In many cases this unproductive “temporary” monopoly is 100 years long and still being extended longer, and is thus not temporary at all. In a world running at internet speed, a century-long legal lockup is a serious detriment to innovation and creativity. It’s a vestigial burden from a former era based on atoms.
The entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.
So what should the new laws favor in a world of remixing?
Appropriation of existing material is a venerable and necessary practice. As the economists Romer and Arthur remind us, recombination is really the only source of innovation—and wealth. I suggest we follow the question, “Has it been transformed by the borrower?” Did the remixing, the mashup, the sampling, the appropriation, the borrowing—did it transform the original rather than just copy it? Did Andy Warhol transform the Campbell’s soup can? If yes, then the derivative is not really a “copy”; it’s been transformed, mutated, improved, evolved. The answer each time is still a judgment call, but the question of whether it has been transformed is the right question.
Transformation is a powerful test because “transformation” is another term for becoming. “Transformation” acknowledges that the creations we make today will become, and should become, something else tomorrow. Nothing can remain untouched, unaltered. By that I mean, every creation that has any value will eventually and inevitably be transformed—in some version—into something different. Sure, the version of Harry Potter that J. K. Rowling published in 1997 will always be available, but it is inevitable that another thousand fan fiction versions of her book will be penned by avid amateurs in the coming decades. The more powerful the invention or creation, the more likely and more important it is that it will be transformed by others.
In 30 years the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.
9 INTERACTING
Virtual reality (VR) is a fake world that feels absolutely authentic. You can experience a hint of VR when you watch a movie in 3-D on a jumbo IMAX screen in surround sound. At moments you’ll be fully immersed in a different world, which is what virtual reality aims for. But this movie experience is not full VR, because while your imagination travels to another place in a theater, your body doesn’t. It feels like you are in a chair. Indeed, in a theater you must remain sitting in the same spot looking straight ahead passively in order for the immersive magic to work.
A much more advanced VR experience might be like the world Neo confronts in the movie The Matrix. Even as Neo runs, leaps, and battles a hundred clones in a computerized world, it feels totally real to him. Maybe even hyperreal—realer than real. His vision, hearing, and touch are hijacked by the synthetic world so completely that he cannot detect its artificiality. A yet even more advanced mode of VR is the holodeck on Star Trek. There, holographic projections of objects and people are so real in fiction they are solid to the touch. A simulated environment that you can enter at will is a recurring science fiction dream that is long overdue.
Today’s virtual reality is in between the elemental feeling of a 3-D IMAX movie and the ultimate holodeck simulation. A VR experience in 2016 can involve a billionaire’s mansion in Malibu that you walk through, room by overstuffed room, feeling as if you are really there when you are actually standing a thousand miles away wearing a helmet in a real estate agent’s office. That is something I experienced recently. Or it might be a fantasy world full of prancing unicorns where you authentically feel you are flying, once you put on special glasses. Or it may be an alternate version of the office cubicle you are sitting in that includes floating touch screens and an avatar of a distant coworker speaking next to you. In each case, you have a very strong sense that you are physically present in this virtual world, in large part because you can do things—look around, freely move in any direction, move objects—that persuade you that you are “really there.”