Ethic in remix
August22
A part of the syllabus for this semester is from the book ‘remix’ by Lawrence Lessing.
He speaks about a woman Silvia0 that uploaded music under the creative commons license to the web page ccmixter. A song ‘nada, nada’ meaning nothing nothing mas mixed to the almost unrecognizable. Changing the mood of the song.
For my project i want to have a look on ethics in remixing. Core questions are : Can we make remixes freely? How about original message and settings? Can an illegal use of a original artwork be important? and is there Legal use of artwork that is ethical questionable?
I will publish a more detailed description later on.
This sounds like an excellent topic – and I’m sure you’ll manage to focus it more as we go
You’ll need to think about what you mean by ethics – you should probably include some basic philosophy of ethics. Take a look at the Wikipedia page for “ethics” just to get an overview and figure out what directions you might be interested in exploring. Probably a good book to start to think about the ethical sides of remix is Charles Ess’s recent book Digital Media Ethics, which has a chapter on Copying and Distributing in Digital Media. Then of course in addition you’ll have all the popular and scholarly discussion about copyright, copyleft, creative commons, open source, etc – which may be what you want to concentrate on, but you will need some ethical theory as well. Charles Ess is actually coming to Bergen in October, and is giving a talk for us on Wednesday October 21 at 12:15 – and one at Infomedia the day before. He’s an ethics professor who’s specialised in the internet for a couple of decades, so would certainly be a good person to talk with about these issues 
The University Library doesn’t have Ess’s book yet (I just asked them to buy it) but you can borrow it from my office for a few days if you like.
Should be a fun project – I’m looking forward to learning more!!