Our social lives as art

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The mashup and the meme aren't new, but there is an interesting video on YouTube about "stage 2" video mixes and their creative and social implications.  The narrator describes  how a group of friends in Brooklyn spent an afternoon creating a video tribute to a "stage 1" remix of 80's Brat Pack movies, which itself was an homage to those works.  A second group in San Francisco then made another video that was a recreation of the Brooklyn video.



The narrator explains how this is an act of social creativity, how "our real social lives themselves are transmuted into art."  He also gives one of the most compelling explanations for why aggressive copyright enforcement may not be protecting our society, but harming it:

Copyright policy isn't just about how to incentivize the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity. It's about what level of control we're going to permit to be exercised over our social realities, social realities that are now inevitably permeated by pop culture.  I think it's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind.  If wer're only focused on how to maximize the supply of one, I think we risk suppressing this different and richer, and in some ways maybe even more important one.  Something to keep in mind.

Indeed.

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Pam is a Board Member of the Open Source Initiative and the principal of Chestek Legal in Raleigh, North Carolina. She works with creative communities, giving practical legal advice on branding, marketing, and protecting and sharing content.

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