Copy/Culture: How to Deal with Our Obsession for Authenticity in the Digital Age?
About this book
Design culture is obsessed with authenticity. Copying is often deemed reprehensible, and borrowing another's idea or incorporating elements of his or her work into one's own is viewed as a sign of creative impoverishment. But is this right? What's wrong with interpreting someone else's creation? Musicians have been quoting each other's work for centuries--why shouldn't the same thing happen in other creative disciplines? Where does quotation end and copying begin, and how original is an original anyway? Is intellectual property protection appropriate in an age of digital distribution, when it's difficult to identify a product's author, maker, or inventor? And in a culture in which quotation and copying have long led to enrichment and innovation, should these acts be made impossible? In this book, several thinkers from the worlds of design, architecture, art, business, and copyright law elaborate on the future of copyright and the right to copy.