[NetBehaviour] Behind Technology: Sampling, Copyleft, Wikipedia, and Transformation of Authorship and Culture in Digital Media.

[marc garrett]

Behind Technology: Sampling, Copyleft, Wikipedia, and Transformation of 
Authorship and Culture in Digital Media.

By SACHIKO HAYASHI

Introduction

In the digital environment where our intellectual and creative works are 
created and stored in unified digit format and can thereby be 
transferred or copied as 0-1 information, the ease of making digital 
duplicates quickly found its way into the sampling culture. Today the 
term “sampling” is identifiable with digital sampling. Another computer 
feature, namely the ease of updating web sites by erasing, rewriting or 
replacing its contents, resulted in fluid publishing, bringing 
collaborative authoring such as Wikipedia into its existence while 
making the Internet virtually a space for open creative collaboration. 
Composed as a free journey with its starting point in sampling, this 
essay attempts to provide a brief summary of several relevant issues. 
The first part examines the history of sampling, touching upon its 
relation to appropriation and postmodern criticism. The second part 
focuses on the idea of intellectual property and its opposing forces 
manifested in the free software movement, copyleft and open 
collaboration. The third and last part briefly states the new cultural 
environment of the web, returning to the sampling culture and its future.

http://artcopyright.interartive.org/sachikohayashi/