Tuesday November 26, 2002

How To Be A Genius

Posted by Hash | Tag: IPR/Open Content

It’s sharing ideas that leads to innovation. The Romantic idea of the artist as a lonely genius? It’s more like Newton and Oasis and the rest of us jostling for position on the shoulders of giants.

According to Malcolm ‘Tipping Point‘ Gladwell, innovation happens when people egg each other on. Group social interaction results in radical ideas.

He looks at how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, how Darwin, Watt and Priestley, how TV comedians Saturday Night Live got together and got down – in John Belushi’s case to coke snorting and everybody’s wife – to produce, in the end, pure genius.

Of course, innovation needs heads-down time too. The trick is to ‘combine the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity’ and create an environment that’s safe and yet stimulating.
- New Yorker

Glib? Sure, everybody nowadays loves innovation, creativity and thinking out of the rectangular container. Just needs a little singing from the same hymnbook. Buzzword bingo!

But Gladwell has a point. Creativity requires collaboration. It also requires the ability to rework ideas taken from a common stock.

Continue reading How To Be A Genius

(200 words read, 390 words in all, around 1:34 mins to read)

Monday November 25, 2002

Rip, Mix and Desist

Posted by Hash | Tag: IPR/Open Content

Develop an existing idea so that it becomes something new and you’ll be applauded for your creativity and genius. Unless you’re hit with a cease-and-desist letter first.

The images and sounds in Illegal Art, currently at New York’s 313 Gallery, broke copyright law and so media corporations and their lawyers dragged the artists responsible to the courtroom.

Not Mickey

Not a familiar cartoon character by Ashley Holt

Highlights include:

  • Brian Boyce’s State of the Union: George W Bush lights up the Teletubbies
  • Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy: Team pushups with Goofy and Minnie and the rest of the Disney gang
  • Ray Belder’s $ Mao: Warhol’s Chairman Mao portrait gets a money makeover
  • The JAMs’ The Queen and I MP3: Dancing Queen is bjorn again

    • Friday April 12, 2002

    Ready for My Shot

    Posted by Hash | Tag: IPR/Open Content

    Without copyright term extensions, old films wouldn’t get distributed, argues the entertainment industry. ‘Indiscriminate exploitation’ by public domain copyists would reduce the flow of cash to Big Media and hence the motivation Big Media needs to ‘publish’ films.
    - CS Monitor

    Intellectual property academics Lawrence Lessig and Jason Schultz say that’s so much baloney. Digging around the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Schultz finds that out of the 37,000 or so movies released between 1927 and 1946, only 2,480, 6.8%, are commercially available.
    - Lessig Blog

    So, advice to Hollywood: why not place the whole lot in the public domain and see what happens?

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