Original subtitles

remix to combine or edit existing

materials to produce something new

the term remix originally applied to

music it rose to prominence late last

century during the heyday of hip hop the

first popular music form to incorporate

sampling from existing recordings early

example Sugar Hill Gang samples the bass

riff from sheiks and good times in the

1979 hit rapper's delight' now what you

hear is not a test on rapid the beat and

me the groove and my friends are gonna

try me since then that same bass line

has been sampled dozens of times 15 good

no strike real nice and I'm a pop I'm a

son Trey haha oh so better gotta skip

ahead to the present and anybody can

remix anything music video photos

whatever and distribute it globally

pretty much instantly you don't need

expensive tools you don't need a

distributor you don't even need skills

remix Inc is a Foca anybody can do it

yet these techniques copying materials

transforming them combining them the

same ones used at any level of creation

you might even say everything is a remix

now to explain let's start in England

in 1968

Jimmy paid recruits John Paul Jones

Robert Plant and John Bonham to form

Led Zeppelin they play extremely loud

blues music that will soon be known as

wait let's start in Paris in 1961

William Burroughs coins the term heavy

metal in the novel of The Soft Machine a

book composed using the cut-up technique

taking existing writing and literally

chopping it up rearranging it so in 1961

William Burroughs not only invents the

term heavy metal the brand new music

Zeppelin and a few other groups of

pioneer he also produces an early remix

back to Zeppelin by the mid-1970s Led

Zeppelin are the biggest touring rock

band in America yet many critics and

peers label them as ripoffs the case

goes like this the opening and closing

sections of bringing on home are lifted

from a tune by Willie Dixon entitled not

coincidentally bring it on home but I'm

bout my chicken I got my

know the lemon song lifts numerous

lyrics from Howlin Wolf's killin fool

black mountainside lifts its melody from

black waterside a traditional arranged

by Bert Jansch

Dazed and Confused features different

lyrics but is clearly an uncredited

cover of the same title song by Jake

Holmes Holmes file suit over 40 years

later in 2010 it's not dazed and

confused' hanging on by a thread

and the big one stairway to heaven pulls

its opening from spirits Taurus the

estate of songwriter Randi California

filed suit in 2014

Zeppelin clearly copied a lot of other

people's material but that alone isn't

unusual

only two things distinguish Zeppelin

from their peers firstly when Zeppelin

use someone else's material they didn't

tribute songwriting to the original

artists most British blues groups

reporting lots of covers but unlike

Zeppelin they didn't claim to have

written secondly Zeppelin didn't modify

their versions enough to claim they were

original many bands knockoff acts that

came before them but they tend to

emulate the general sound rather than

specific lyrics or melodies Zeppelin

copied without making fundamental

changes so these two things covers

performances of other people's material

and knock-offs

copies that stay within legal boundaries

these are long-standing examples of

legal remix in this stuff accounts for

almost everything entertainment industry

produces and that's where we're headed

in part two

ah

wait one less thing in the wake of their

enormous success Led Zeppelin went from

the copier to the copied first in the

70s with groups like Aerosmith and Hart

in Boston then during the 80s heavy

metal craze and on into the era of

sampling here's the beats from when the

levee breaks getting sampled and remixed

I want to go

perhaps it's because movies are so

massively expensive to make perhaps it's

because graphic novels TV shows video

games books and the like are such rich

sources of material or perhaps it's

because audiences just prefer the

familiar

whatever the reason most box-office hits

rely heavily on existing material of the

10 highest-grossing films per year from

the last 10 years 74 out of 100 are

either sequels or remakes of earlier

films or adaptations of comic books

video games books and so on transforming

the old into the new is Hollywood's

greatest talent

at this point we've got three sequels to

a film adapted from a theme park

attraction we've got a movie musical

based on a musical which was based on a

movie we've got two sequels to a film

that was adapted from an animated TV

show based on a line of toys we've got a

movie based on two books one of which

was based on a blog which was inspired

by the other book that was adapted into

the film Julie and Julia do you follow

we've got 11 Star Trek films 12 Friday

the 13th and 23 James Bond's we've got

stories that have been told retold

transformed referenced and subverted

since the dawn of cinema we've seen

vampires more from hideous monsters to

caped bedroom invaders to campy jokes to

sexy hunks to sexier hunks

of the few box-office hits that aren't

sequels remakes or adaptations the word

original wouldn't spring to mind to

describe them

these are genre movies and they stick to

pretty standard templates genres then

break up into subgenres with our own

even more specific conventions so within

the category of horror films we have

subgenres like supernatural slasher

zombie and creature feature all have

standard elements that are appropriated

transformed and subverted let's use the

biggest film of the decade as an example

now it's not a sequel remake or

adaptation but it is a genre film sci-fi

and most tellingly it's a member of a

tiny sub-genre we're sympathetic white

people feel bad about all the murder

pillaging and annihilation being done on

their behalf I call this sub-genre sorry

about colonialism I'm talking about

movies like Dances with Wolves The Last

Samurai the last of Mohicans d'un

Lawrence of Arabia a man called horse

and even Fern Gully and Pocahontas films

are built on other films as well as on

books TV shows actual events plays

whatever this applies to everything from

the lowly is on refills right on up to

revered Indy fare and it even applies to

massively influential blockbusters the

kinds of films that reshape pop culture

which brings us to

even now star wars indoors as a work of

impressive imagination but many of its

individual components are as

recognizable as the samples in a remix

the foundation for Star Wars comes from

Joseph Campbell he popularized the

structures of myth in his book the hero

with a thousand faces

Star Wars follows the outline of the

monomyth which consists of stages like

the call to adventure supernatural aid

the belly of the whale the road of

trials the meeting with the goddess and

a bunch more also huge influences were

the Flash Gordon serials from the 30s

and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa

star wars plays much like an updated

version of Flash Gordon right down to

the soft wipes and the opening titles

design from Kurosawa we get masters of

spiritual martial arts a low-ranking

bickering duo more soft wipes a beneath

the floorboards hideaway and a boastful

baddie getting his arm chopped done my

channels name love it you just watch

yourself we want it Ben

I have the death sentence on 12 systems

war films and westerns were also huge

sources for Star Wars the scene where

Luke discovers his slaughtered family

resembles this scene from The Searchers

and the scene where Han Solo shoots

Rideau resembles this scene from the

good the bad and the ugly the climactic

air strikes in the Dambusters 633

squadron and the bridges at toko-ri

played very similarly to the run in the

Death Star and in many cases existing

shots were even used as templates for

Star Wars special effects

there's also many other elements clearly

derived from various films we have a tin

man like the tin woman in Metropolis a

couple shots inspired by 2001 I grabbed

the girl on swing scene like this one in

the 7th voyage of Sinbad a holographic

projection kind of like the one in

Forbidden Planet a rally resembling this

one in triumph of the will and cute

little robots much like those in Silent

Running George Lucas copied materials he

combined them he transformed them

without the films that preceded it

there could be no Star Wars creation

requires influence everything we make is

a remix of existing creations our lives

and the lives of others as Isaac Newton

once said we stand on the shoulders of

giants which is what he was doing when

he adapted that saying from Bernard de

chartres in part 3 we'll further explore

this idea and charge the blurry boundary

between the original and the unoriginal

George Lucas was the most movie

saturated filmmaker of his era

but that baton has since been passed to

Quentin Tarantino's remix master thesis

is Kill Bill which is probably the

closest thing Hollywood has to a mashup

packed with elements pulled from

countless films kill bill raises filmic

sampling to new heights of

sophistication the killer nursing in

particular is almost entirely a

recombination of elements from existing

films the basic action is the same as

this scene from Black Sunday where a

woman disguised as a nurse attempts to

murder a patient with a syringe of red

fluid Daryl Hannah's eyepatch is a nod

to the lead character and they call her

one eye and the tune she's whistling is

taken from the 1968 thriller twisted

nerve capping it off the split-screen

effect is modeled on techniques used by

Brian De Palma in an assortment of films

including carrot

the act of creation is surrounded by a

fog of myths myths that creativity comes

via inspiration that original creations

break the mold that they're the products

of geniuses and appear as quickly as

electricity can heat of filaments but

creativity isn't magic it happens by

applying ordinary tools of thought to

existing materials and the soil from

which we grow our creations is something

with scorn and misunderstand even though

it gives us so much and that's copying

but simply copying is how we learn we

can't introduce anything new until we're

fluent in the language of our domain and

we do that through emulation for

instance all artists spend their

formative years producing derivative

work Bob Dylan's first album contained

eleven cover songs richard pryor began

his stand-up career doing a not very

good imitation of Bill Cosby and Hunter

s Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby

just to get the feel of writing a great

novel nobody starts out original we need

copying to build a foundation of

knowledge and understanding and after

that things can get interesting

after we've grounded ourselves in the

fundamentals through copying it's then

possible to create something new through

transformation taking an idea and

creating variations this is

time-consuming tinkering but it can

eventually produce a breakthrough James

Watt created a major improvement to the

steam engine because he was assigned to

repair a Thomas Newcomen steam engine he

then spent 12 years developing his

version Christopher Latham Sholes

modeled his typewriter keyboard on a

piano

this design slowly evolved over five

years into the QWERTY layout he still

used today and Thomas Edison didn't

invent the lightbulb his first patent

was improvement in electric lamps but he

did produce the first commercially

viable one after trying six thousand

different materials for the filament

these are all major advances but they're

not original ideas so much as tipping

points in a continuous line of invention

by many different people but the most

dramatic results can happen when ideas

are combined by connecting ideas

together creative leaps can be made

producing some of history's biggest

breakthroughs johann Gutenberg's

printing press was invented around 1440

but almost all its components had been

around for centuries Henry Ford and the

Ford Motor Company didn't invent the

assembly line interchangeable parts or

even the automobile itself but they

combined all these elements in 1908 to

produce the first mass-market car the

Model T and the Internet slowly grew

over several decades as networks and

protocols merged it finally hit critical

mass in 1991 when Tim berners-lee added

the World Wide Web

these are the basic elements of

creativity copy transform and combine

and the perfect illustration of all

these at work is the story of the

devices we're using right now so let's

travel back to the dawn of the personal

computer revolution and look at the

company that started it all

Xerox

Xerox invented the modern personal

computer in the early 70s the alto was a

mouse driven system with a graphical

user interface there in mind that a

popular personal computer of this era

was operated with switches and if you

flip them in the right order

you got to see blinking lights the alto

was way ahead of its time

eventually Apple got a low - the alto

and later released not one but two

computers with graphical interfaces the

Lisa and its more successful follow-up

the Macintosh the alto was never a

commercial product but Xerox did release

a system based on it in 1981 the star

8010 two years before the Lisa three

years before the Mac it was the star on

the alto that served as the foundation

for the Macintosh the Xerox star used a

desktop metaphor with icons for

documents and folders it had a pointer

scroll bars and pop-up menus these were

huge innovations and the Mac copied

every one of them but it was the first

combination it incorporated that's at

the Mac on a path towards long-term

success Apple aimed to merge the

computer with the household appliance

the Mac was to be a simple device like a

TV or a stereo this was unlike the star

which was intended for professional news

and vastly different from the cumbersome

command based systems that dominated the

air the Mac was for the home and this

produced a cascade of transformations

firstly Apple removed one of the buttons

on the mouse to make its novel pointing

device less confusing then they added

the double-click for opening files the

star used a separate key to open files

the Mac also let you drag icons around

and move and resize windows the star

didn't have drag and drop you moved in

copied files by selecting an icon

pressing a key

and clicking a location and you're

resized windows with a menu the star in

the alto both featured pop-up menus but

because the location of these would move

around the screen the user had to

continually reorient the mac introduced

the menu bar which stayed in the same

place no matter what you were doing and

the Mac added the trash can to make the

leading files more intuitive and less

nerve-wracking

and lastly through compromised and

clever engineering Apple managed to pair

the Mac's price down to $2,500 still

pretty expensive but much cheaper than

the $10,000 Lisa or the $17,000 star but

what started it all was the graphical

interface merged with the idea of the

computer as household appliance the Mac

is a demonstration of the explosive

potential of combinations the star in

the alto on the other hand are the

products of years of elite research and

development they're a testament to the

slow power of transformation but of

course they to contain the work of

others the alto and the star our

evolutionary branches that lead back to

the NLS system which introduced Windows

and the mouse to sketchpad the first

interactive drawing application and even

back to the Memex a concept resembling

the modern PC decades before it was

possible

the interdependence of our creativity

has been obscured by powerful cultural

ideas but technology is now exposing

this connectedness we're struggling

legally ethically and artistically to

deal with these implications and that's

our final episode part 4 what if Xerox

never decided to pursue the graphical

interface or Thomas Edison found a

different trade what if Tim berners-lee

never got the funding to develop the

World Wide Web

would our world be different would we be

further behind history seems to tell us

things wouldn't be so different whenever

there's a major breakthrough there's

usually others on the same path maybe a

bit behind

maybe not behind at all Isaac Newton and

Gottfried Leibniz both invented calculus

around 1680 for Charles Darwin proposed

the theory of evolution by natural

selection but Alfred Russel Wallace had

pretty much the same idea at pretty much

the same time and Alexander Graham Bell

and Elisha gray filed patents for the

telephone on the same day we call this a

multiple discovery the same innovation

emerging from different places science

and invention is riddled with it but it

can also happen in the arts and film for

instance we had three Coco Chanel movies

released within nine months of each

other around 1999 we had a quartet of

sci-fi movies about artificial reality

even Charlie Kaufman's unusually

original film

Synecdoche New York bears an uncanny

resemblance to Tom McCarthy's novel

remainder both of the stories of men who

suddenly become wealthy and start

recreating moments of their lives even

going so far as to recreate the recur

and actually this the video you're

watching was written just before the New

Yorker published a Malcolm Gladwell

story about Apple Xerox and the nature

of innovation we're all building with

the same materials sometimes by

coincidence we get similar results but

sometimes innovations just seem

inevitable

the genes in our bodies can be traced

back over three and a half billion years

to a single organism Luca the last

Universal common ancestor as Luca

reproduced its genes copied and copied

and copied and copied sometimes with

mistakes they transformed over time is

produced every one of the billions of

species of life on earth some of these

adopted sexual reproduction combining

the genes of individuals and altogether

the best adapted life forms prospered

this is evolution copy transform and

combine and culture evolves in a similar

way but the elements aren't genes

they're memes ideas behaviors skills

memes are copied transformed and

combined and the dominant ideas of our

time are the memes that spread the most

this is social evolution copy transform

and combine it's who we are it's how we

live and of course it's how we create

our new ideas evolve from the old world

but our system of LOD doesn't

acknowledge the derivative nature of

creativity instead ideas are regarded as

property as unique and original Lots

with distinct boundaries but ideas

aren't so tidy they're layered they're

interwoven they're tangled and when the

system conflicts with the reality the

system starts to fail

for almost our entire history ideas were

free the works of Shakespeare Gutenberg

and Rembrandt could be openly copied and

built upon but the growing dominance of

the market economy where the products of

our intellectual labors are bought and

sold produced an unfortunate side effect

let's say a guy invents a better light

bulb his price needs to cover not just

the manufacturing cost but also the cost

of inventing the thing in the first

place now let's say a competitor starts

manufacturing a competing copy the

competitor doesn't need to cover those

development costs so his version can be

cheaper the bottom line original

creations can't compete with the price

of copies in the United States the

introduction of copyrights and patents

was intended to address this imbalance

copyrights covered media patents covered

inventions both aim to encourage the

creation and proliferation of new ideas

by providing a brief and limited period

of exclusivity a period where no one

else could copy your work this gave

creators a window in which to cover

their investments and earn a profit

after that their work entered the public

domain where could spread far and wide

and be freely built upon and it was this

that was the goal a robust public domain

an affordable body of ideas products

arts and entertainment available to all

the core belief was in the common good

what would benefit everyone but over

time this principle transformed beyond

recognition influential thinkers

proposed that ideas are a form of

property and this conviction would

eventually yield a new term intellectual

property this was a meme that would

multiply wildly thanks in part to a

quirk of human psychology known as loss

aversion

simply put we hate losing what we've got

people tend to place a much higher value

on losses than on gains so the gains we

get from copying the work of others

don't make a big impression but when

it's our ideas being copied we perceive

this as a loss and we get territorial

for instance Disney made extensive use

of the public domain stories like Snow

White Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland

were all taken from the public domain

but when it came time for the copyright

of Disney's early films to expire they

lobbied to add the term of copyright

extended artists Shepard Fairey has

frequently used existing art in his work

this practice came to a head when he was

sued by The Associated Press for basing

his famous Obama hope poster on their

photo nonetheless when it was his

imagery used in a piece by Baxter or

very threatened to sue and lastly Steve

Jobs was sometimes boastful about

Apple's history of copying we have you

know always been shameless about

stealing great ideas but he harbored

deep grudges against those who dared to

copy Apple I'm going to destroy Android

because it's a stolen product I'm

willing to go thermonuclear war on this

when we copy we justify it when others

copy we vilify most of us have no

problem with copying as long as we're

the ones doing it

so with a blind eye toward our own

mimicry and propelled by faith and

markets and ownership intellectual

property swelled beyond its original

scope with broader interpretations of

existing laws new legislation new realms

of coverage and alluring rewards in 1981

George Harrison lost a 1.5 million

dollar case for subconsciously copying

the doo-wop hit he's so fine in his

ballad my sweet lord

really one

prior to this plenty of song sounded

much more like other songs without

ending up in court Ray Charles created

the prototype for soul music when he

based I got a woman on the gospel song

it must be Jesus Tom good to me oh yeah

starting in the late 90s a series of new

copyright laws and regulations began to

be introduced and many more are in the

works the most ambitious and scope are

trade agreements because these are

treaties and not laws they can be

negotiated in secret with no public

inputs and no congressional approval in

2011 ACTA was signed by President Obama

and the trans-pacific partnership

agreement currently being written in

secret aims to spread even stronger

us-style protections around the world of

course when the United States itself was

a developing economy it refused to sign

treaties and had no protection for

foreign creators Charles Dickens

famously complained about America's

bustling book piracy market calling it a

horrible thing that scoundrel

booksellers should Grow Rich

patents coverage made the leap from

physical inventions to virtual ones most

notably software but this is not a

natural transition a patent is a

blueprint for how to make an invention

software patents are more like a loose

description of what something would be

like if it actually was invented and

software patents are written in the

broadest possible language to get the

broadest possible protection the

vagueness of these terms can sometimes

reach absurd levels for example

information manufacturing machine which

covers anything computer like or

material object which covers pretty much

anything the fuzziness of software

patents boundaries has turned the

smartphone industry into one giant turf

war 62% of all patent lawsuits are now

over software the estimated wealth lost

is half a trillion dollars the expanding

reach of intellectual property has

introduced more and more possibilities

or opportunistic litigation suing to

make a buck to new species evolve whose

entire business model is lawsuits sample

trolls and patent trolls these are

corporations that don't actually produce

anything they acquire a library of

intellectual property rights then

litigate to earn profits and because

legal defense is hundreds of thousands

of dollars in copyright cases and

millions and patents their targets are

usually highly motivated to settle out

of court the most famous sample troll is

Bridgeport music which has filed

hundreds of lawsuits in 2005 they scored

an influential court decision over this

two-second sample that's it and not only

was the sample short it was virtually

unrecognizable

this verdict essentially rendered any

kind of sampling no matter how small

infringing the sample heavy musical

collages of hip-hop's Golden Age are now

impossibly expensive to create now

patent trolls are most common back in

that troubled realm of software and

perhaps the most inexplicable case is

that of Paul Allen he's one of the

founders of Microsoft he's a billionaire

he's an esteemed philanthropist who's

pledged to give away much of his fortune

and he claims basic web features like

related links alerts and recommendations

were invented by his long defunct

company so the self-proclaimed idea man

suit pretty much all of Silicon Valley

in 2010 and he did this despite no lack

of fame or fortune so to recap the full

picture looks like this we believe that

ideas are property and we're excessively

territorial when we feel that property

belongs to us

our laws then indulge this bias with

ever broadening protections and massive

rewards meanwhile huge legal fees

encourage defendants to pay up and

settle out of court

it's a discouraging scenario and it

raises the question what now

the belief in intellectual property has

grown so dominant it's pushed the

original intent of copyrights and

patents out of the public consciousness

but that original purpose is still right

there in plain sight the Copyright Act

of 1790 is entitled an act for the

encouragement of learning the Patent Act

is to promote the progress of useful

arts the exclusive rights these acts

introduced were compromised for a

greater purpose the intent was to better

the lives of everyone by incentivizing

creativity and producing a rich public

domain a shared pool of knowledge open

to all but exclusive rights themselves

came to be considered the point so they

were strengthened and expanded and the

result hasn't been more progress more

learning it's been more squabbling and

more abuse we live in an age with

daunting problems maybe the best idea is

possible we need them now we need them

to spread fast the common good is a meme

that was overwhelmed by intellectual

property it needs to spread again if the

mean prospers our laws our norms our

society they all transform that social

evolution and it's not up to governments

corporations or lawyers it's up

to us

you

you

hi everybody I'm Kirby I originally

produced this series from 2010 to 2012

yes it has been five years since

everything is remix launched to

celebrate this anniversary I'm finishing

off some tasks that I've been meaning to

get to for a long time

first of all I am producing t-shirts

these have been requested a lot over the

years and I'm finally doing it I've

launched a small Kickstarter campaign

that will run until October 12th I have

two different shirts for sale and I have

a brand new copy transform combined

poster these also include a subscription

to my acclaimed new series this is not a

conspiracy theory which the Guardian has

called spectacularly ambitious the link

to the Kickstarter campaign is below and

by backing me you are also helping me

produce new work speaking of which I now

have a patreon account so if you'd like

to see new free videos for me head on

over to patreon and become a patron and

the second thing that I've been meaning

to get to that I have just completed is

what you just saw I took the original

four parts of the series merge them

together create a good edits between the

sections rebuild and improve the first

part did various tweaks throughout fixed

a few errors in the content and

basically polished up everything is

remixed for posterity thank you to all

of you for watching thanks to all of you

who have supported this project thank

you to the people who have helped

produce the videos and thanks also to

the artists who allow me to use their

work in the series complete sources can

be found at the website so please do go

and support those artists as well and

thank you to Ian quarry who helped me

rebuild and improve some of the scenes

in the series thanks also to Rudolf

boots who helped improve the voice-over

audio and sorry if I'm butchering your

name alright that's it if you'd like to

see more from me back me on Kickstarter

or become a patron on patreon thanks so

much for watching take care bye bye