Authorship and Authority: Why I Didn't Write This

"I love you!" Who wrote that? Ought you claim it? With the proliferation of media that we've seen over the course of the last 20 years and beyond, intellectual property and authorship have become hot-button issues. Social media and the concomitant applications offer services that allow us to "Share" information that we've encountered on the web with others very easily. One of the most oft-used features of an operating system is copy-and-paste. While artists have always dealt with issues of borrowing and sourcing, technologies in the information age bring these issues to the forefront.

Problems of self and property have been touched on by philosophers, social critics and others since before history. It was renowned textual and conceptual artist Jenny Holzer who included as one of her truisms, "private property created crime." It was the infinitely influential Rousseau who once noted that "the first man who ... fenced in a piece of land [and] said "This is mine" ... was the true founder of civil society." Preaching about the faults of property and the "I," "me," and "mine" of society, however, is not the impetus of this essay.

It has been drawn to my attention that there is a book being published collecting the tweets of some of those involved in the recent revolution in Egypt. Jraissati's article begins with an explication of authorship dilemmas in the digital age. She posits that "the dematerialization of cultural products is in the process of revolutionizing the notion of the “book.”" Not only is this "dematerialization" process changing ideas about what is or isn't a book, it is affecting conceptions of art across all media. Mainstream publishing and distribution is not the only avenue in which we may note changing ideas regarding intellectual property.

An examination of the terms "intellectual property" and "copyright" may now become appropriate. Intellectual property rights consist of laws in which "owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs." Intellectual property is slightly different from notions of copyright in that copyright protects not the ideas, but their expression. While we have each had the idea I've begun this discussion with, "I love you!," it seems absurd to claim an ownership of the idea or its expression.

It is curious that authorship shares much of an etymological basis with the word "authority." In the same sense in which we use the word "authority" to mean a certain degree of power over something, authorship as it relates to copyright and intellectual property grants an individual a certain power over an idea or expression. It is obvious how tenuous these distinctions become when we begin to consider some of the details of copyright law. Copyright grants an author rights over an "original work." While for some it may not be difficult to determine what is "original" and what isn't, considering the never-ending dynamism of language and thought may give us insight into what I consider the absurdity of "originality."

Jraissati's article states that "tweets are not copyrightable because they are too short." From this we may extrapolate that the components of a work, be they words, sounds, phrases, graphemes, lines, colors, etc., are not what is protected under law, but the composition of them all in tandem, a certain unity in their arrangement, is what is protected. Many artists in the past 100 years have toyed with ideas of replicas and reworkings. For example, Kenneth Goldsmith has completed tasks that include transcribing daily the New York Times newspaper, as well as writing out in excruciating detail the weather reports over a certain period of time.

Yet another, and perhaps more interesting, study was done by writer J. L. Borges regarding Don Quixote. Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," explores issues of authorship, authority and property by positing a writer who goes beyond just translating the classic work of Cervantes and eventually recreates the document word for word through a sort of immersion in the original author's atmosphere. I myself have created curious "poetry" regarding Borges, ideas of literary forgery and the accompanying concern with authorship and property.

Issues of identity, likeness and similitude have been explored extensively by philosophers since time immemorial. One of the best studies as regards works of art and their ontological replications may be found in Arthur Danto's "Transfiguration of the Commonplace." Danto begins his study, which presents his institutional theory of art, by positing a set of blue ties that are empirically nondifferentiable, but have different causal histories. One tie was painted blue by a child, one was used as a rag by an illustrious artist, etc. His study of artist/author intent and the concomitant acceptance or nonacceptance by an art community gives a different insight into issues of authorship.

Finally, I'll consider the concept of authority and authorship in a religious context. It is widely known that the prophets in Semitic religions did not make claim to what they preached. From Abraham to Muhammad, each of these figures explained that the knowledge and language they were disseminating was not their own but that of a Supreme Being. Maimonides has written extensively on these issues, influencing Spinoza and thus most of modernism. These people make no claim that what they were saying was theirs and had no concern for their "right" to keep their expression free from copying, distribution, or adaptation. We find an applicable term in the tradition of Hinduism with the word "avatar." This term means a "deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth." In traditional symbolism we may interpret this as a manifestation of Source in our terrestrial realm.

It is also interesting that in the digital age we use the word "avatar" as "a computer user's representation of himself/herself." In a sense we are participating in an analogous relationship to the traditional description of a descent of a deity. We as users become the Source of our identity and authorship while our avatars are our re-presentations in a different realm, that of the Internet-work. It seems we have come full circle. Our "avatars" are talismans or placeholders for ourselves as authors or seats of authority (power) over our content. We see across all social media platforms a connection between our online self-image and our content. Online content in social networks typically consists of a user's name or image directly next to their content. As mentioned previously, however, it is easy using appropriation techniques such as copy-and-paste to separate content from user.

We find yet another striking example of this separation of content from author, work from authority, with rap music and DJing. Bourriaud has done a great study of the use of appropriation in contemporary arts with his Post-Production. All across mainstream radio we hear popular musics that are not only built from the samples of prior musics, but relentlessly reference and borrow from each other. It is possible to hear not only the recurrence of a typical voice (Lil Wayne might appear in a series of songs on popular radio at any moment), but we hear the same phrasings borrowed. While a hit like "Fancy" may have its own "original" content, another song will shortly thereafter reappropriate the phrasing for its own ends.

Because of the technology and automatons we've constructed in our Enlightened modern society, we have access to a plethora of information with an ease never before seen in history. It is possible for me to appropriate information from millions of sources within minutes where in years past I would have had to travel distances to sources of collected information and then perform the menial task of copying by hand. Freedom of media and access to information are changing the world around us rapidly. We see this in the recent political developments in North Africa and the Middle East. Ideas of intellectual property and copyright are being challenged and blurred by such technologies as Twitter and others. What one considers as "mine" is changing. I yearn, like Rousseau, for the moment when none of us "claims" a thought or expression as original and we each realize the debt we owe to the silence, the nothing, the Source that allows us. Until then I demonstrate only love, and insist that I didn't write this!