Rowling vs. Vander Ark

Saw a very interesting article the other day over on Techdirt regarding a teenager who remixed and or plagiarized the works of others into a best selling book which is up for a prestigious prize in Germany.  I’ll share some passages from the Techdirt article and then a few brief quotes from a New York Times story and leave you to make of it what you will.  Anyway, from the Techdirt article:

“Here’s a story that will get traditionalists up in arms about “stealing” and “laziness,” but they’ll all be missing the point. We’ve see for decades how remix culture works in music. The ability to take the works of someone else, mix them up with others, change them around and create something new and powerful, is a wonderful expression of culture, that shows how artistic culture is often about shared experiences and sharing works of art. But what about in the literary world?”

And here from the New York Times article:

“Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms.”

And also:

“Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity…”

Well, those quotes by themselves should be enough to generate some discussion but check out the full articles.  Interesting reading.  Have fun!

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