Copyright in a Remixed World
In 1941, the French author Pierre Menard wrote “truth, whose mother is history, [is the] rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.” Menard, a contemporary of the Godfather of psychology, William James, wisely asserts that historical fact is not what happened, but what we believe to have happened.
But Pierre Menard is not a real person.
Jorge Luís Borges, the 20th-century Argentinian writer and thinker, created the character of Pierre Menard in one of his most thought-provoking short stories, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. The full Spanish text is available here and Andrew Hurley’s translation into English here.
The story, in the form of a book review, examines Pierre Menard’s new book Don Quixote. The book reviewer notes that Menard’s text is “almost infinitely richer” than Miguel Cervantes’ 1605 classic. The catch: the two books are verbally identical — the words are exactly the same.
Copyright and Remix Theory
The question Borges poses in Pierre Menard is whether two identical works can have distinct meanings. Answering this question is paramount to understanding the role of Copyright in a remixed, open-source world; in the opinion of Borges, a recontextualized work can be “almost infinitely richer” than the work that is copied.
Creativity, authorship, and the nature of ideas have been called into question with technological advances such as the computer, the mp3, and the internet. “Remix Theory” seeks to understand the questions and problems presented by these advances through a philosophic lens. Borges, true to his proleptic style, analyzed remix avant la lettre in at least two of his writings, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote and Kafka and his Precursors.
*This is an abbreviation of a term paper written for a seminar focused on the writings of Jorge Luis Borges . The full argument can be found in both English and Spanish on my website.
