What is the "price" of the "words" we use today? We communicate more freely than ever before benefited by the ease of capture and "republication" on the World Wide Web. But our time-honored notions of copyright and the ownership of images, writings, and sounds by their creators are being turned on their head. Copyright was created by society to allow creators the opportunity to claim economic compensation for their activity, but now, through the universality of digital media (digital cameras, video and audio recorders, and just the ubiquitous keyboard we are all pounding away at) every individual has become a creator. How can we communicate using the newly created content, the "words" of our era, if their ownership is tied up and regulated?
These ideas come to mind as a group of artists come to town who have been "playing" in the world of audio sampling and collage for several decades. It is through the activity of this group, Negativland, that rethinking about communication and ownership of creative content has been stimulated and projects such as Creative Commons have been instituted.
All of these thoughts carry me back to a wonderful episode in the great comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, by Winsor McCay. On May 1, 1910, on the colored "funny" pages of the New York Herald, Little Nemo has arrived on Mars. But he finds that the plutocrats have gotten there first and have turned the planet into a capitalist's dream world. It is an absolute "ownership society." To breathe, to speak, require one to first purchase from the "owners" air and words!
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