January 22nd, 2012
Swagger-Jacking: Beyonce, Pinspire and Why Copycats Are Good For Business
Now that the SOPA-Opera is quieting down to a barely-audible murmur, I think it’s an excellent time for some deep thinking about the real issue here: how our understanding and acceptance of copycats, remixing, fair-use, originality and especially “piracy” has changed, and what that means for future legislation.
Piracy just isn’t what it used to be. Much of the SOPA debate centered around the refrain of “well both sides agree that piracy is bad.”
Piracy As Beneficial
What if there were a good kind of piracy, one where both the original source AND the rip-off-artist benefited? The evolution of the web as a creative medium has fostered the growth and evolution of this new type of piracy, and the legal system has yet to catch up.
Put differently, if links are a new currency, and the post-Google universe has taught us that more inbound links are better for business, then copycatting can sometimes be beneficial for the original creator.
A few examples:
1. How many people know about Bob Fosse’s “Mexican Breakfast” now because of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video? And to the right kind of pop music geek, the name Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is recognizable and familiar because of the striking similarities to “Countdown”:
2. The recently-release Pinspire, a pixel-perfect knock-off of Pinterest, drew mostly rage from the web community for its shameless copycatting. But with every mention of Pinspire, there’s a mention of Pinterest alongside it. Pinspire is just one of many copies, and the general response to these products, both online and off, is “Pinterest clone”. Pinterest’s position in the zeitgeist is helped, not hurt, by the proliferation of clones.
3. Sh*t Girls Say. Oh, you’re sick of these videos already? And yet the videos keep coming, and keep racking up millions of views. Should the creator of video #1 be pissed that people stole his idea, or psyched that he created a cultural phenomenon?
Masters of Swagger-Jacking
It seems to me there’s this invisible line between awesome re-use and deplorable hack. Kia Williams calls it “swagger-jacking”.
Some artists do it seamlessly and use it as a tool to create awesome shit. Grantland’s piece said it best: “…as millions of gay guys in leotards on YouTube and a drunk Kanye can attest, [Single Ladies] was one of the best videos of all time.” Should this video not have been made because the concept wasn’t exactly original?
Is it even the place of the legal system to figure out where to draw this line? Many software entrepreneurs are notoriously bitter about the antiquated patent system, and the SOPA fight has demonstrated, for one, that many average Americans will be complicit about “piracy” in the name of free speech preservation.
Erosion of Originality
The ability of the web to disseminate information so seamlessly may have the unintended consequence of killing originality.
But does that even matter? The widespread commoditization of content creation has resulted in different definitions of what exactly it means to be “original”, and I think we, and the legal system, should embrace that at least a little.