Thirty-one years ago this month, a U.S. Federal Court ordered George Harrison to give up the majority of royalties from his hit song “My Sweet Lord” because he had unintentionally, subconsciously copied a Chiffons’ melody as the basis for his own song. Harrison was never accused of plagiarism, he was instead found guilty of Cryptomnesia, otherwise known as unconscious plagiarism.

Cryptomnesia is not limited to the realm of music. Carl Jung noted in a speech in 1905 that Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” includes an almost word for word account of an incident from a book published half a century before Nietzsche’s. This is neither considered purposeful plagiarism nor pure coincidence. Nietzsche’s sister confirmed that he had indeed read the original account when he was 11 years old. Similarly, in 1916, Heinz von Lichberg published a story called “Lolita”. Forty years later Vladimir Nabokov wrote a novel by the same name, with the same plot, but to quite a bit more acclaim.

However not all cases of cryptomnesia have been of such literary import. Who could forget the episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine is ecstatic to sell a cartoon to The New Yorker only to find out she has unconsciously penned a Ziggy. From Seinfeld episode “The Cartoon”:

Jerry: You ripped off a Ziggy?

Elaine: It must’ve seeped into my subconscious, Puddy has Ziggy bed sheets.

Modern examples of this phenomenon are too numerous to list although two of the more recent, blatant examples come from pop music. Avril Lavigne’s new album includes songs sounding similar to those of seventies bands the Rubinoos and Peaches. The Red Hot Chili Peppers recent hit “Dani California” is almost a direct musical copy of Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”.

But what is the world of art, literature, music and thought without unconscious plagiarism? Of course we are all influenced by what we have seen, read and heard throughout our lives. It would be a feat of either extreme insanity or intense isolation to create a piece of content without influence or reference. This very blog post is both an intentional plagiarism of the sources linked to herein and an unintentional plagiarism of sources too numerous to even imagine.

Now here of course it should be noted that this is not an endorsement of actual, illegal, plagiarism. Passing off someone else’s work as your own is as wrong now as it ever was or ever will be. This instead is an argument for systemic change in how we use creative content as a society, which may be achieved without breaking any laws.

The internet has both increased our exposure to content and made it easier to appropriate that content for our own purposes. Many blogs have made a name for themselves by simply linking to content elsewhere on the web. The original creator may only be revealed after following a seemingly endless chain of links, some of which may take you back to where you started.

The internet has begun to enable content sharing, mash-ups and collaboration. Similarly, artists, writers and thinkers have begun to realize this shift and even embrace it in some cases. Bestselling novelist Jonathan Lethem (author of “Motherless Brooklyn” and “Fortress of Solitude”, two of my favorite books, both of which I intend to unconsciously plagiarize at some point) has launched The Promiscuous Materials Project. On the website Lethem is giving away a number of his stories and songs for users to “adapt or mutate” as they please. He also lists thirty projects in which others have created songs, stories and movies by reshaping his work.

Sharing content inevitably leads to interesting – if not superior – versions, which can even open up the original work to a larger audience. The perfect example of this is the “Grey Album”. When hip hop mogul Jay-Z released the “Black Album,” he put out a lyrics-only version in order to encourage mixing and sampling. A little known producer named Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, fused the music from the Beatles “White Album” with lyrics from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” to create the groundbreaking “Grey Album”. Despite the fact that it was never marketed or released, Rolling Stone called it “the ultimate remix record” and Entertainment Weekly ranked it the best record of 2004. Beyond launching Danger Mouse’s career and giving Jay-Z’s album a second life, the Grey Album had the unexpected consequence of introducing a generation of hip hop fans to the Beatles.

So while it may live on in legal textbooks and high school classrooms, pseudo-plagiarism in the public realm is becoming increasingly acceptable in many circumstances. If all content is partially plagiarized then surely nothing is truly original. And if nothing is truly original then we might as well embrace sharing and collaboration as a means to a greater end. The notion that plagiarism, no matter how slight, is a crime to be prosecuted will live on through the efforts of overzealous companies and misguided artists, but hopefully, it will diminish in significance as online communities and technology work to shift the paradigm.

A number of startups are paving the way to collaborative content creation online. Jumpcut is a collaborative video production site where people can upload, remix and share their pictures and videos. MusicShake is a music mixing service that lets users create their own professional quality music using online tools. Kaltura enables users to do with video, audio, and animation what wikis have enabled them to do with text. Even the big guys are taking notice; AOL runs Ficlets, a story collaboration website and is launching a multimedia story telling service called Bluestring. And of course, our very own MixedInk intends to contribute to this space in the coming months.

The poet Audre Lorde once said, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” And that really encapsulates this movement. It is not about taking someone else’s work and calling it your own. It is about taking disparate works, and changing, adding, and re-mixing them to reflect your voice, then presenting it back to the community to continue on its promiscuous path, hopefully affecting people and making itself felt along the way. In this journey, MixedInk hopes to lead the way.

The author of this post is an advisor to MixedInk.

We recently asked you to pick our new logo, and the response was pretty incredible - if we learned anything, it’s that people have pretty strong opinions when it comes to design! Thanks to all 181 people that voted or left comments.

Here is the winner, with some slight tweaks we made based on your feedback. As you’ll notice, we’re now using this logo all over the site.

It was a tight race. The winning logo got 33%, with the second place finisher at 29% and the logo we had been using at 23% (we keep waiting for someone to bring up hanging chads). Given the fact that there was no clear consensus, we may revisit the issue later on. If you’ve got more ideas or advice to share, let us know in the comments or by email.

And don’t forget to sign up to be a beta tester here!

Just a quick post to draw your attention to a recent piece in The New Republic. It highlights the fact that for some topics, Wikipedia’s combination of a strict neutral point of view policy and its dependence on the wiki platform results in articles that leave something to be desired. (No, this is not about its occasional - way overblown - inaccuracies!) We were pleased to see the author, Douglas Wolk, practically arguing for the type of complementary writing tool we are developing.

Wolk explains why Wikipedia isn’t the perfect venue for reporting on politics and other potentially controversial topics. Here’s an excerpt:

Graceful writing takes a distant second place to neutrality. The language of the “Plame affair” article, like a lot of Wikipedia, is flatly declarative, not particularly quotable and occasionally afflicted with wobbly construction… And so the entry is an obstacle course of little infelicities and colorless clots of subclauses, from the first paragraph’s factual but pace-dragging citation of Joe Wilson’s memoir The Politics of Truth to the concluding section, headlined “Other perspectives on the CIA leak scandal,” which reads (following a link to “Alternate theories regarding the CIA leak scandal”) in its entirety: “Since the CIA leak scandal became public knowledge, commentators began presenting multiple and often highly-contested perspectives on it in various media.” You don’t say.

To make a case for how the parts of the Plame tzimmes fit together is, unavoidably, to make a political argument. That’s antithetical to the Wikipedia ethos, whose dedication to unvarnished facts is worthy of Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind. Without some kind of thesis behind it, “Plame affair” is a dehydrated feast, a 20,000-word catalogue of notes and quotations and factoids that all have some bearing on the case in question but aren’t weighted for significance, have no particular narrative thread, and don’t begin to explain the meaning of the whole thing. It’s hard to imagine a Wikipedia that could function any other way, but the Internet hive-mind, negotiating in good faith and carefully hammering out compromise language, has done exactly what it was supposed to do–and failed anyway. The article, for all its catholic precision, isn’t actually useful, because it’s almost impossible to read… Wikipedia, friends, is boring.

Wolk hits the nail on the head. Generally speaking, and especially when it comes to controversial subjects, writers must make value judgments - whether writing individually or collectively. They must convey the order, context, and relative importance of an article’s components in order to sculpt narrative, digestible prose. As a tool, the wiki simply lacks the capacity to aggregate value judgments from a large number of contributors.

As regular readers of this blog know, this capacity is one of the central distinctive features of the MixedInk platform. We will allow contributors to focus not only on content, but also on style - which can be just as important in getting a point across.

(For more on how we intend to improve on the wiki, see this earlier post.)