WALKING ON EGGSHELLS ---creativity in the copyright era
Walking on Eggshells" is a 24-minute documentary about appropriation, creative influence, re-use and intellectual property in the remix age. It is a conversation among various musicians, visual artists, writers and lawyers, all sharing their views on why and how we use and create culture, and how intellectual property law, originally designed to provide people with incentives to create, sometimes hinders creative production far more than it enhances it.
This film is our final project for the seminar "Intellectual Property in the Digital Age" at Yale University.
Directed and Produced by:
Jacob Albert
Ryan Beauchamp
Brendan Schlagel
Interviews with (in order of appearance):
Eclectic Method
DJ Earworm (Jordan Roseman)
Joy Garnett
Michael Cunningham
Dudley Andrew
DJ Ripley (Larisa Mann)
Jonathan Lethem
E. Michael Harrington
Edgar Garcia
via Ariam Sahle
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
~ Thomas Jefferson
This film is our final project for the seminar "Intellectual Property in the Digital Age" at Yale University.
Directed and Produced by:
Jacob Albert
Ryan Beauchamp
Brendan Schlagel
Interviews with (in order of appearance):
Eclectic Method
DJ Earworm (Jordan Roseman)
Joy Garnett
Michael Cunningham
Dudley Andrew
DJ Ripley (Larisa Mann)
Jonathan Lethem
E. Michael Harrington
Edgar Garcia
via Ariam Sahle
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
~ Thomas Jefferson
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