Kirby Ferguson
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2017–2026
37:31 · 926K views · May 17, 2016
Kirby Ferguson's video essay series arguing that creativity is built on copying, transforming and combining existing work. It covers music, film and technology, then turns to copyright and patents.
HN invokes it constantly in debates over originality, copyright and AI training, and calls it the best explanation of creativity as remixing.
18 comments from Hacker News
I find that most people don't understand creativity. If you believe an artist or inventor is some mystic sage who creates works ex nihilo , then you misunderstand creativity and attribute to it far too much. And therefore you might grant an artist a period of copyright that is longer than is really deserved or needed. Through much of my life, I have been accused of being "creative". In elementary school my class recognized me as the best at drawing. In fifth grade I wrote a book that was checked out so many times from the school library that it filled up the check-out card front and back. In high school, I made dozens of little movies with my friends. After college I was a graphic designer, and both of my employers expressed awe at my work. The best explanation of creativity that I have found is a video series by Kirby Ferguson called Everything Is a Remix, this video It shows what I always knew in the back of my head: that nothing I ever made was from staring at a blank sheet of paper. It was just me ripping off all my favorite things I had seen before. Everyone tries their hand at art, and often it obviously is a copy. My secret was that I would take a little of this, a little of that, copy 5 different things and mix them all together, rather than making a straight copy of just one thing. I wasn't trying to hide anything, it was just how my mind naturally worked. I thought one thing from one movie was cool, so I took part of that. I thought something else from a drawing was co
Watch Everything is a Remix: this video I've been prolific over the years in programming and art & code, and about 99% of it was remixes of others work. I'm not ashamed of that - many artists draw inspiration from multiple sources. The trick is to put your own spin on it, not directly rip off someone else's work. Many artists will never tell you they borrowed from various sources, because they think that would come across as unoriginal and merely copying others work, but have a few beers with an artist and suddenly they start sharing their secrets...
Reminds me of one of my favourite video essays -- "Everything is a Remix" [0]. The video and this article cover the same ideas albeit with different examples. Which is funny on a meta level -- the article could be called a remix of the video. The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking patents/IP law as anti-creative. [0]: this video
> it's to allow the creator to extract all the possible value from their work That may be why governments of the world keep passing copyright laws now and how they view copyright. But copyright was established as a "balance" between making it profitable for the author to create the work (read: not to extract billions of dollars out of a work) in order to benefit the public . The primary goal has always been to benefit the public, not the author. Also, one of the reasons why copyright should be finite and not have too long of a term is because no author has ever created anything - anything at all - from scratch . They themselves have built upon the work of others . This is why copyright is meant to be a system where one creates something upon something else, and then someone new can create something new upon that previous work, and so on. Copyright was meant to be a kickstarting mechanism for authors, not a rent-seeking one, which is how it's used today. If you still don't see this what I'm trying to say from my comment, I highly suggest you watch this video: this video
This discussion reminds me of the "Everything is a Remix" [1] documentary. We tend to look at the winners to explain history, even though in many cases multiple players were working on the same theories at the same time, and the likely outcome would have been exactly the same if the winners have not existed. Worth watching. [1] this video