13:55 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 a filament. 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 we scorn and misunderstand, even though it gives us so much. And that (the soil) is COPYING.
I feel like even though you produced this documentary, you scarcely have an idea how important it is. This simple idea, with some undoubtedly frustrating research and quite excellent production values, is one of the most important documentaries of our time. From the depths of my heart, I thank you.
Rewatching this now, I feel like this may be the genesis for many modern video essay styles. At least the edit-heavy ones. If I sat down i could probably draw a direct link from this video to Kaptain Kristian, who made the style massively popular a few years ago. Everything. Is. A Remix.
Terribly sorry, this feature has actually been removed by RU-vid. I am thinking about how to solve this problem for the coming relaunch of the series. Best!
This is brilliant! Truly educational and enlightening. Oddly enough this boosts my motivation to create. I hear people always complaining about how copying is always fake art. Almost everything ive made was copied or based on something. Heck even my icon is just a re-color of a video game character. But you gotta start somewhere, drawing cartoon characters line by line can help you understand how drawing works. This is a very professional looking documentary, extremely well edited. Im not an art student but i feel art teachers and professors should sbow this in their classes.
I first saw this series at the beginning of my filmmaking career almost 5 years ago. At the time none of my teachers knew about this masterpiece. I told everyone I met to see this immediately. And now almost 5 years later teachers play this on classes and we discuss the importance of remixing (well) on our work. I´m from Lima Perú btw, And Kirby THANK YOU!
This video is very incorrect. The first sign that you are using words wrong is if somehow you arrive at a conclusion that a word either refers to everything or nothing, which is incorrect if the words are neither literally "everything" nor "nothing". Here you somehow make BOTH mistakes, by claiming that everything is a remix and that nothing is really original. This isn't a sign that society is completely wrong, it's a sign that you don't know what you are talking about. Words exist to distinguish one thing from another, if we couldn't distinguish original songs from remixed songs we wouldn't use either term when referring to music ever. If you want to know the exact reason you slipped up so bad, it was on your failure to distinguish inspiration from art and inspiration from reality and personal experience. The true definition of originality in art is taking inspiration from reality and personal experience. Let's say you've never read a war novel before, but you served in the army and knew how to write. If you then wrote a book about your true experiences, that book is wholly original even if another veteran had very similar experiences. If someone who has never served in the army read your book, then wrote their own book about serving in the army, that would be unoriginal and derivative of another work of art. The perfect example of this logical flaw is the comparison you made at 13:07. Yes, it's possible that the Kill Bill scene was strictly based on Black Sunday, but it's also possible that both scenes were inspired by real-world events of nurses killing patients (which is a more common experience than most would expect.) The same issue with the Star Wars and Triumph of the Will comparison could be derivative, or they could both just have been inspired by real-world military rallies which do look like that. There are thousands of songs written about love because it's a universal human emotion, but people writing about similar experiences in similar ways is not derivative the same way copying popular lyrics is. The one thing that you are right about, is that you can still be unoriginal and creative. However, levels of creativity depend on a) the number of diverse sources for inspiration, b) the capacity to which these different inspirations were seamlessly combined, and c) the amount of originality mixed in. In all these "sample" examples, the samples are still mixed in with some original lyrics, performances, and instruments. In that way it isn't a complete remix. A complete remix is when the source is strongly based on a single song, has few to no original samples, and simply rearranges the song to have perhaps a different beat, extended bridge, or some other purely structural change. This is what the music industry actually considers a remix. You are just taking the dictionary definition of the word remix way too literally, and not at all spreading an understanding of the word that would be relevant to the way it is used.
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I remember when Apple sued Samsung for using the swipe to unlock. And my first thought was, swipe to unlock is basically a digital version of a bolt lock. That's when I knew the digital age would be about IP's more so than development.
For me, it was Apple suing Microsoft for using a trashcan for deleted files. Microsoft renamed theirs "Recyle Bin" and that made everything just fine. 🙄
So glad Chris Ray Gun braught me here. A really nice perspective on the process of how ideas are born! Hopefully our copyright laws will one day change back to what they were intended to be in the first place. Thank you Kirby Ferguson. Checking out the TED talk.
Absolutely brilliant, highly educational and very enjoyably enlightening exposé on how history repeats itself. Many thanks for all your hard work Kirby, and wishing you the very best success in everything you do.🌟 💜🌈
I think it’s pretty interesting and inspiring in some way that ideas/creativity are like forms of energy in a scientific sense. it can’t be created (as in something uniquely brand new) and it can’t be destroyed. this is a brilliant video and i can’t express how much I love it
What I found funny was when Beethoven's Symphony no. 7 mvt. 2: Allegretto was played because it's a variation on Bach's Violin Sonata no. 1 mvt. 2: Fuga Allegro
Ecclesiastes 1:9, New Living Translation: "History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new." I once thought, "Nothing exists without an opposite to define it." Hot, cold, wet, dry, dark, light, good, evil, truth, lie, integrity, sin, savior, life, death...how we define and conceive our experiences in reality. When AVATAR came out in theaters, I could only think that the creator could only imagine the reality he experienced already. We cannot actually create something we do not know/experienced in reality. Anything outside our reality is outside our possibility. We cannot grasp or conceive a primary color that doesn't exist to us besides blue, yellow or red, and I sometimes think God could have chosen to create a table of elements completely different than what we could know. We conceive only the reality we experience and we can only define something in a certain way because we compare it to something else.
I heard that tune in a restaurant months ago. It caught my attention while I was having lunch, I got the title from the waiter, wrote it on a piece of paper and forgot about it. This morning while looking for a business card in my wallet, I found the paper folded, all wrinkled. I decided to take 2 minutes to look the song up on RU-vid. While it was playing on the stereo, I felt the impulse to look for a random VSauce episode, still on youtube. I like VSauce: he addresses really complex issues with such refreshing clarity. I ended up watching "Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?" which adresses the question of creativity in music. I even watched one of the videos referenced in it by VSauce: "Everything is a remix" by Kirby Ferguson. Remember, I did that while listening to Fresh Blue Agave in the background. At the end of it, I went back to the song and decided to take a look at the comments only to find yours and stumble... on my favorite part of the Bible (mine is the Jerusalem Bible), The Ecclesiastes: Nihil novi sub Sole... great surprise. I remember memorizing large parts of it a long long time ago when in my prime. Further to my initial surprise I realized that the first comment listed above was by the same Kirby Ferguson who did "Everything is a remix" linked in the other video by VSauce. I suddenly came to realize I had just watched three different and separate lines of reality merging under my eyes: VSauce, Fresh Blue Agave and the Ecclesiastes. And here I am with too long of a message just to tell you I agree with you when you write "We conceive only the reality we experience and we can only define something in a certain way because we compare it to something else". But this however is only a part of the equation and I do not think you are right when you write "Anything outside our reality is outside our possibility". The real issue I believe is the origin of the inspiration: where does it comes from ? Many tried to theorize about it: Nietzsche's Theophory? Plato's Theory of Forms? Synchronicity and the Collective Inconscious of Jung? ... to name a few. I have seen, been the witness of more than my share of things that cannot be explained by what we see, hear, touch, smell or taste only, enough to know that there is so much more to discover and so little time. And meanwhile I keep looking. I thought about sharing this reflexion. Hope that helped!
Primary colors aren't blue, red and yellow. I believe you refer to subtractive primary colors which are cyan, magenta and yellow. Otherwise the additive primary colors are reg, green and blue. Just want to clear that out since knowledge about colors is passed wrong by tradition over generations without actually explaining or proving how it works. There is plenty of information on the web how colors work and mixing CMY together you would make every other color out of that. Btw that's how printers work in CMYK mode and not in RBY mode :)
This is the documentary that gave me the courage to create. I never thought I could create, never understand what was creativity. Always thought it was something only “artists” could do. I have seen the first episode when it first came out, I was in high-school back then. I waited for the other episodes to come out religiously. You can’t possibly imagine how much it helped me and probably so many others. Thank you!
I think the only complaint I have with this masterpiece is the inclusion of Dune in the "Sorry about Colonialism" subgenre. Otherwise this gets a flawless pass. My friend uses it in her Arts classes in university, to show the intersectionality of media as well as how fucked up current IP law is.
This documentary talks a lot about the ethical discussion between artists and images generated by AI. The current claim of the artists is about copying, without realizing that they copy themselves. But they call it "inspiration", and not copy/transform
There’s a difference between drawing inspiration from other people’s work and copying people’s work. Artists that draw inspiration from other works still bring their own ideas and perspectives into the art that they create while AI is still yet to be able to do this.
@@rio8123 AI working exactly as you described about humans. AI do not copy pixel by pixel from other artists. They use existing images to create their own based on them. Just like humans do. This whole documentary talks about how humans don't create anything from scratch.
@@YuriRosas_ AI does not produce art in the same way that humans do, as I described. Artificial intelligence does not have its own perspective or ideas. As for your second point, although it does not copy other artists’ art pixel by pixel, AI does use images from an online database, that is comprised full of art made by human artists, and puts them through filters to get a desired product. That is nothing like the way that artists “remix” other people’s work. Also, if the inspiration behind someone’s artwork is too obvious to the point it comes across as plagiarism, the stealing artist can be held liable. The same cannot be said for AI art however.
@@rio8123 you do not have a good enough understanding of how AI art works, based on what you have said. I suggest looking into it further, from the dalle website.
So, Fortnite copied, PUBG, who copied the Culling, who copied a gmod battle royale game mode mod, who copied The Hunger Games, who copied Battle Royale (the Japanese movie)?
Avatar is literally the 1992 animated film “FernGully: The Last Rain Forest.” Let me know if any of this sounds familiar: a young white man works for an organization that needs a tree for its business. The man doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but he needs a job and this one works. The man is then changed into the same size as the beings that depend on the tree for life. The man falls in love with a girl who will one day be the leader of her people and he ends up fighting the same corporation he was working for to save the species and their tree. It should sound familiar because it is the exact plot for both FernGully and Avatar I’m not joking, that’s literally what happens in FernGully.
Wow, you really thought you were sharing an original thought here, didn’t you? This was put forward literally the week Avatar was released, and regularly after that. It’s a very, very famous criticism.
Toy Soldiers, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Soldier Blue, Jurassic Park, Apache, Star Wars, Predator, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, Disney/Pixar last 16 identical movies, Star Trek, MASH... Every frame lifted. Only thing missing is Dark Star. Thank God for Spongebob!!
The case in point, Joseph Campbell's work on structure of narratives is quite similar to the work of a Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp that preceded Campbell's by more than a decade. Everything is a remix even on a meta-level.
Law 1 of thermodynamics. You can't create something out of nothing. Therefore by definition everything is a remix. Hell a person is just a mix of their parents genes.
Ingenuity isn't dependant on something being 100% original. People can innovate on the basis of others' ideas, whether consciusly or not, and create something entirely new, that transcends any ties to the original idea. Besides, multiple people can have the same ideas independently.
Thank you for your video. As a writer, this cuts deep in the heart. And give me confidence to keep imitating the giants that came before me, until I become as them. As they say, nobody starts to learn guitar with their original songs. First, they have to learn a ton of songs. Then, theory. Then, as the video show us: they remix old things into new creations. It's fascinating! Thank you again ❤️
@Kirby Ferguson A deeply illuminating examination of creativity! 1. I have to admit I was skeptical at the beginning but you make a great case for how very few movies are really all that creative. 2. You couldn't include everything, but besides Xerox PARC developing the main idea of the personal computer, the first Xerox printer itself was a synthesis of four other patents! A shout out to Andrew Price for sending me here!
Originally, the term "heavy metal" had been used in describing density of "metalloids" before Burroughs, a simple search on google gives this result from wikipedia: "An early use of the term "heavy metal" dates from 1817, when the German chemist Leopold Gmelin divided the elements into nonmetals, light metals, and heavy metals. Light metals had densities of 0.860-5.0 g/cm3; heavy metals 5.308-22.000. The term later became associated with elements of high atomic weight or high atomic number. It is sometimes used interchangeably with the term heavy element. For example, in discussing the history of nuclear chemistry, Magee notes that the actinides were once thought to represent a new heavy element transition group whereas Seaborg and co-workers "favoured ... a heavy metal rare-earth like series ...". In astronomy, however, a heavy element is any element heavier than hydrogen and helium.["
I never really thought of everything as a remix.and many times have I taken someone else's idea and customized it to my desires and make something better and new with the materials I had. You learn something everyday I guess.
Great vid, intelligently composed and brilliantly presented. But it is not right to blame markets for the government program that is intelectual property today. And while the narrator laments that "the 'common good' was a meme that was overwhelmed by [the meme of] intellectual property", he fails to note how the idea of a 'common good' has overwhelmed the fundamental original moral ideas of non-aggression and property rights (and that to copy is not to steal).
Captain Obvious here: "Meme" did not originally refer to funny internet posts, but to self replicating information analogous to genes. The term was invented by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the 70ies who thought about how genetic information is self-replicating chemical information which influences its own success based on its content. He noticed that ideas and thoughts have striking similarities to this. Ideas are copied like genes; are recombined like genes; and are transformed/mutated like genes. Languages are collections of ideas that slightly change over time and place and become independent new languages, just like genes in the genepool change over time and place and become independent species. A gene is the smallest functional self-replicating unit and in analogy to this, he coined the term "meme" to refer to the smallest self-replicating memory/idea. Image macros and funny ideas are copied so heavily based on their own merit that they were the prime example for what a meme is. They were going "viral" in the minds of people just like the flu virus (which is just a small collection of genes). So the meaning of the word "meme" ironically mutated to refer to those silly, fast spreading internet jokes. *Captain flies away *
Brilliant! Loved how you reached across time and sector to identify the core aspects of human and biological function. This will influence my thinking ongoing.
If you're talking about blues, and copying, there really does not exist, a blues riff that can be definitely attributed to a single musician. We are talking about a form of music that existed outside of copyright law before white people started recording the music that black people had been passing on from one generation to the other. The only thing that can be definitively determined, is who first recorded, and/or copyrighted any given piece of blues music. I think that copyright law is currently being used to make sure that people who didn't write any music, can claim profit from someone who does something similar. Chord progressions, two bar melodic structures, rhythms, are the building blocks of songwriting. Under the current system, it will soon be impossible to write new good music, because if you use any little snippet thats been used before, BMI/ASCAP will have a computer AI scouring the internet in search of anything that has a tiny bit of a copyright work that they believe they own. To make it worse, they are trying to extend copyrights into perpetuity. To be sure ASCAAP/ BMI do not care about the culture of creativity in music, they are not out the protect the music and livelihoods of songwriters, except the heavy hitters that are saturating the pop culture.
@Christian Foster Well the artist who it is passed to literally is remixing and copying it. Slightly tweaking and slightly changing it like a game of telephone even if by accident. When songs are passed on by oral tradition they change. Sometimes purposely and sometimes because our memory misremembers things. The human brain often create false memories or remembers thing slightly different from retellings. A good example of a song like this would be The Ball Of Kerrymuir which has changed through being passed down. I believe the origins of the song are Scottish.
I saw this one years ago. I'm a musician and it changed the way how I look at things. Every now and then I think back to this docu. Thank you so much for making this.
This is amazing, thank you so much for this! I had no idea that so much of Star Wars was influenced by previous movies (am I surprised? Nope!)
5 лет назад
10:27 Darth Vader mask was inspired by DC Comics Super-Villains building from Super Friends and concept of the Force from 21-87 a Canadian experimaental film.
The emphasis on intellectual property protection over the common good (the patent system was in part intended to prevent inventors from taking their ideas with them to the grave) isn't only due to loss aversion. It's also due to their being no money in protecting the public domain. The money is all in the prosecution of violations. How many lawyers make a living working for the common good?
Incidentally, I would flip the photos of Elizabeth Phair and Alanis Morisette. And while Morisette’s rise in 1995 did seem to eclipse Liz’s 1993 ascendency with Exile in Guyville, I don’t think of Morisette’s work as a knockoff.
Man watching this again 7 years later it’s like we’re living on a different planet. We were so unconcerned in 2015 that IP reform was up at the top of the heap.
"By definition, remix could very be the very song itself, re-mixed differently." The modern "remix" of a song (as Joel Zimmerman says, aka deadmau5) is called a rework. The actual definition of the word Remix has been lost in translation for quite some time now. Reworking is re-inventing, like taking vocal and putting new music along the vocal. Remix is a re-creation of original, not a new song itself, it would be a re-work, re-interpretation. Modern remixes of good songs are rarely good, because an originator never has in mind to make a song that someone else would make it better. A bad music is interesting to remix. Brilliant ideas can be poorly executed, that's where remixes can help.
was shown this video as part of my Interdisciplinary Inquiry course. Helped put to words the basic but strong idea of 'why can't we just share' that I wouldn't know enough to defend on my own. ♥
I think you should create a sequel called "Everything is Language". Tell us a story about how generative AI makes the marginal cost of remixing basically 0.
Kkkk. O Gabriel do nada no meio do vídeo. Todo mundo metendo pau nos geradores de arte por IA dizendo que elas tão copiando os artistas e eu aqui dizendo que não é bem assim, e ninguém entendendo o porquê.
We limit creativity to a point that few shows ever feel unique. Then we recently have AI imitating writing which could potentially lose a lot of jobs to writers if it becomes too advanced :/
My professor assigned this video as homework and is basing the course off of it! Great video that I think raises some really important points. Makes me super excited for the class
The single greatest explanation of creativity and and it will perpetually and eternally clarify messy copyright and intellectual property issues for you. You should make time to watch this with your undivided attention.
Edison copied Joseph Swans UK patent to get to his working (long life) commercial lightbulb, but Swan had his on the market a year earlier. After their lawyers went at it in the courts, they decided to bury their hatchets and join forces to form the Edison-Swan Lighting Company. After Swan got bored with the business of business and left, Edison set about burying Swan's contribution and re-wrote history.
There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man. Peter Kropotkin.
Brilliant! I have seen his 3 earlier remix videos. For some reason this paraphrase of a CG Jung quote came to mind. Humans are all made of the same building blocks. It was how they are arranged that creates individuality.
The "sorry about colonialism" as a sub-genre made me laugh out loud! This is such a great video, and gets to one of the main reasons I don't really care about "originality" in entertainment, as usually anything claiming that badge is really a remix of "you thought this was gonna end the way you wanted, but gotcha!" which I hate.
So copyright and IP protections introduce friction into evolution or they don't really since no one with IP or copyright will take action against someone copying them until that entity has enough money worth pursuing so in a way if you're successful using their IP then they can get a kickback through a lawsuit.
