The New

Originally published on wipout.net, 1998

The new is a product of creative reuse, repetition a form of change. IP is premised on a fundamental untruth: that innovation is a process of mystical osmosis accomplished by an individual genius. This conceals the fact that all new ideas, in art, culture and science, are usually only incremental adaptations of received wisdom, and at most a radical reassessment of what went before. It was only in the last few centuries of the last millennium that the notion that things could have been different emerged. We must wrest the legal and commercial framework out of this mindset if creativity and cultural life are not to be forever constrained and deformed by this retarded logic. Prior to the modern age, knowledge and culture spread through the shared oral culture of folk songs and storytelling. The printing press led to a material manifestation of fixed ideas in the form of books, prints and musical scores. Recording technology initially threatened to extend this process even further, and yet it has been the field of recorded music that has posed the most consistent threat to IP. For once a piece of music has been recorded for posterity, it then becomes an object that can be repeated, copied, sampled and remixed. The state of shock the music industry is currently in reveals the redundancy of the IP model in the face of an all pervasive piracy. This undermines the vested interests of musical distributors, but it is not in itself a threat to creativity or to the economic survival of individual artists. We owe it to both art and artists to cast of this redundant straight jacket and challenge the vested interests of Big Business, avoiding the shrapnel as they majestically and spectacularly continue to shoot themselves in the foot.