My Own Personal Copyfight

Do you ever notice then when your writing that it's never really you writing? It not really your voice in your head, but rather some other voice, some other person narrating your life for you. When I'm writing this blog for example, I adopt the tone of a snarky blogger -- I use simple, self deprecating language with quick remarks. It is me writing this, but every word I write is somehow informed by the other bloggers I read. I'm hearing their voices in my head as I write. This isn't just with blogs either. When I'm writing news articles I have Peter Mansbridge reciting my every thought; news commentary John Ibbsiton; and longer more in depth articles I pretend I'm Maclom Gladwell writing about something really really cool for the New Yorker. When I'm writing fiction I tend to adopt the narrative style of the last book I've read. The ideas I have aren't really mine at all; they are a collection of my society's ideas -- I'm simply repackaged them into something that I can claim as mine. Even this idea -- the concept that my thoughts are not really my own -- is one that has been floating around the mass consciousness since the enlightenment. Artists are not wholly original scribes picking wonderfully original ideas from the vacuous emptiness of thin air; instead they are interpreters, conduits of a more massive originality that exists already out their in the real world.
This idea is not new to me. I first started thinking about way back in highschool when I read an article in Harbinger magazine (not the online gaming one, but the more leftist political one: http://www.harbingerproject.com). When I tried to search their online archives I couldn't find it, but the concept stuck with me: quit spending so much time on originality and understand that the nature of art involves stealing, ripping off, and more importantly re-imagining art that has came before it. Take music for example. How many great songs have the same four chord progression? How many great lyrics use similar if not identical rhyme schemes? Shitloads. Too many to name them all here. After all, the defining principle of many genres depends on that similarity -- country music is country music because it uses that same twangy sound, rock music is rock music because they use a lot of "E" bar chords. This is an over simplification I assure you, but you get the point.
When I first decided to write this blog I perplexed about what to write about. Why would anyone want to listen to what I have to say? More importantly would they? On advice about trying to make your blog stick out among the millions that already float around unread in cyberspace, all the blog gurus where clear: have an audience, have a theme, a niche and stick to it. Well in my first post I failed at that, but this second post is the start of something I hope to continue. I want this blog to be about the ideas war, about art and it's relationship to the mass consciousness. Basically that is convoluted way of saying I want my blog to be all about copyright laws.
As an artist, a writer, and as someone who has a vested interest in the free flow of information, I believe that copyright is most important issue of our generation. And believe me, it is not as boring as it sounds. In America, anyone who downloads music, anyone who photocopies newspaper articles, anyone who samples their favorite song for a YouTube video is a potential criminal thanks to Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In Canada, similair things could happen if bill C-61 passes. This is bad news for us net heads who believe in the free flow of information; in the principles of democracy and freedom that saturate the Internet. In the coming weeks, months, and hopefully years I want this blog to be a forum for discussion about these issues and digital rights. On top of the legal and philosophical debates, I will also be sharing some of my trails and tribulations as a young writer trying to find himself -- trying to be original in world where I don't believe it exists. But before I get into that I just want to hammer home the point about my ideas being transient and fluid, and not really mine.
I've been thinking about this stuff for years now and it has informed much of my amateur writing, blogging, and almost all my drunken philosophical rants about downloading music. I've wrote articles about wikipedia, online communities like SecondLife, and copyright laws in academia (thesheaf.com). I've wrote and rewrote pages and pages of draft science-fiction stories dealing directly with a future where this kind of freedom doesn't exist, where creativity is stifled as a result of corporate ownership and strict copyright laws. Then a few months ago I was turned onto to Cory Doctorow. I'd been reading his blog boingboing.net for a few years and seen some his stuff in the Guardian when researching copyright stuff but I never really put it together that he was one guy. Then I find his website last month http://craphound.com and I'm blown away: not only are some of my favorite boing posts done by him, not only are some of the most insightful and poignant articles on copyright and Internet culture writing by him, he is by trade a science fiction writer. (Thanks to him I have put all my school work aside and have dedicated myself to finishing his book, Eastern Standard Tribe, which I downloaded for free. It will be the first entire novel I've read exclusively on my laptop.) I want to be this guy. I want to have his children. I want to invent some sort of mind control device that would transfer my mind into his body. He has my dream job: internet pundit, journalist, and science fiction writer. And, truthfully, he is probably better at it than I will ever be. I'm kinda jealous and a bit unnerved: how could be all those things. I want to be those things! But then I realized, fuck it. This is just the kind of thing I've been ranting about. Dreaming of being a sci-fi writer who blogs about copyright, writes for important newspapers about tech culture isn't an original dream of mine; it's Cory Doctorow's dream and he is already living it. I can't be Cory Doctorow and, save for some creepy stalker mind-altering device, I will never get to be. But do you know what's the best part of admitting your dreams aren't original? Knowing they are possible.