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| photograph by Melissa Lodhi |
All of this discussion about copyright has gotten me thinking. How much of the art that we see is truly original? Should we be crediting all of our sources of inspiration? When we choreograph a dance, we are using a vocabulary of movement created by someone else. At times we are not even aware that we are duplicating something that we have seen or performed because the idea resides so deeply in our subconscious. Music and visual art often are in the same position. It is a narrow road between using something as a source of inspiration and stealing content. I think current copyright regulations go too far and are to the point of stifling creativity. The level of technology available to the masses affords everyone the opportunity to be a creator. This should be the time of the greatest artistic innovation in history. Hopefully, legal hurdles will not crush the artistic spirit.
Copyright as it is currently practiced is our generation's prohibition with normal cultural practices deemed illegal and the law completely out of step with the lives of it's citizens. Thanks to mass media and commercial promotion music and media are all the more a part of our moment to moment experiences in a way that the media industry never intended and cannot satisfy, so other means are being sought and created outside of their control and thus we have the return of a participatory culture where everyone contributes and it's destroying the "professionals only" model. If that were my business model i'd be quite concerned but i'm in the business of setting creatives free and not erecting artificial pay-walls.
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