I recently caught this Ted Talk by Larry Lessig, a Harvard professor who's an expert in copyright law. For me he coalecsed many thoughts I'd been having on copyright, namely that with the internet the paradigm is reverting to a pre-broadcasting model, where mixing, sharing, and crucially to my thinking, story evolution across authors is possible. This is after all, how many of our best stories - myths, legends, fairytales came about. With broadcasting (TV, radio, books) story was a "one truth" to be imposed by the one on the many. Now it's a merely a starting point for others to join, experience and share. Vive la Revolution!
And you've also got to watch it to see Jesus Christ sing "I will survive" pure class!
A friend also gave me a heads up yesterady of two authors who are actually exploring this new way of creating - Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. They've started a wesite called Mongoloid which seems to be an effort to start an evolutionary story about knights at the times of the Mongol invasion of Europe. Everyone's free to add, create and consume the content - which is everything from sound to video to text and pictures - and being lead by two such Sci-Fi luminaries as Stephenson and Bear I'm betting it may go somewhere.
The internet is the new campfire. Food for thought.
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