7- Berfu: Lessig talk

Lessig suggests that the 21st century marks the reemergence of the read-write culture after a period of read only culture, in which a very limited number of people created while others consumed only. His idea of recreation reminded me of Picasso who said that bad artists copy, good artists steal. Stealing in this case is getting inspiration from someone else's work, learning from others and creating one's own piece which eventually becomes a combination of all the ideas he/she "stole". In Picasso's time, the traces of the stealing in that sense appeared subtly in the artworks; in our time it is more obvious as the artists sometimes create an artwork directly "stealing" a part of another creative piece and integrating it to their work in a unique way so that it can be regarded as a completely different artwork. This "copy-paste-create your own" movement is far from plagiarism since the artists puts something from their own into his piece, thus asserts his unique point of view about a certain subject. Their interpretation of the "original" artwork gives way to another artwork which is equally original.

Lessig says that this type of creativity is inevitable in our age especially because of the availability of various media that make easier to reach to any artwork and modify it. He carries this idea a step further and claims that this is how the new generation speaks. So trying to stop them from expressing themselves with laws such as copyright would be useless and would only lead to crime in the form of "piracy". I agree with Lessig's idea and support organizations such as Creative Commons, where it's possible to reach legally to artworks that are labeled as "some rights reserved". However, I still believe that the creator of the original piece still deserves recognition and should be at least referred to in some way in the new piece. Although I support the free culture movement, it also concerns me since it's almost impossible to detect how and in which context the artworks are used. I don't know how one can be sure that their artwork is not completely stolen and used without modification.