Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Author without a ship
The term author is being used daily on a broader scale. People who write blogs are authors; people who take photographs are authors, people who make videos… and so on. It is interesting to consider just how much this word means to some people. If you were to take a picture and someone else used it for a class project would that mean you weren't the author? I took Music of Africa as a class last spring and it made some interesting points about authorship. Similar to what Lessig states, most cultures in Africa didn't have a written form of language for hundreds of years, so they would pass on their songs, stories, and laws through oral tradition. This may be hard for many Americans to comprehend a lack of ownership within their culture. But, you must ask yourself: how can you own something that is not tangible? The idea that we are evolving into a free culture is magnificent. America was founded on the idea that in this country we can be free, so why not allow our authors to be free in the sense that they can use any means necessary to make art, literature, film and so on.
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Great point about the oral tradition in Africa. Songs of that sort don't have authors in the sense we describe. For one thing, they don't produce a material artifact that can be "signed," so each performance is a new one (if I sing a Taylor Swift song, it is always in relation to the artifact, the CD or iTunes track etc.). Also, they had a culture of exchange and improvisation. Of course, we have a radically different technological and social situation, but could you think about current music and artistic practices and transform it along the oral model?
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