{"id":395479,"date":"2010-03-05T22:39:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-06T03:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091229\/1205217535.shtml"},"modified":"2010-03-05T22:39:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-06T03:39:00","slug":"the-myth-of-originality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/395479","title":{"rendered":"The Myth Of Originality…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nina Paley<\/a> alerts us to a neat writeup (with illustrations) that she did, discussing the concept of originality<\/a>, and why it’s so often misconstrued. First, things that many people think are “original” usually aren’t very original at all. They tend to be derivative in some way or another — a point that we’ve made here many times. And yet, many people seem to think that there’s some sort of objective standard for originality, and that something that involves a direct copy of something else as part of the process can’t count as original (though, they conveniently ignore it when “the greats” like Mozart or Shakespeare did a direct cut-and-paste type of copying in their own works).<\/p>\n

Paley then goes on to make a second point: which is that the traditional gatekeepers of culture, for all their talk of the importance of originality (whenever they talk down any kind of copying) are actually more likely to stomp on anything truly original, because there is no “proven market” for it. A movie has to fit a certain formula. A hit pop song must meet a series of pre-programmed conditions. No originality allowed.<\/p>\n

So where is originality really? It’s not an intrinsic value in the work, but in the perception of how people view a work. I find things like Kutiman’s music<\/a> tremendously original and unique, but in the comments here, critics have decried his efforts as “cut and paste copying” of little value. So different people have different takes on originality. Why should we set in place laws that enforce some sort of official standard on what is, and what is not, original, when it’s our own perception that really determines what is original?<\/p>\n

Separately, Paley recently also put together this neat short film that does a nice job of demonstrating that all artwork<\/i> is derivative<\/a>:
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Nina Paley alerts us to a neat writeup (with illustrations) that she did, discussing the concept of originality, and why it’s so often misconstrued. First, things that many people think are “original” usually aren’t very original at all. They tend to be derivative in some way or another — a point that we’ve made here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-395479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}