Copy. Right.

On a summer night in northern Michigan I was doing somersaults in the water while trying to fend off the sleep that sun--still on my face even under the stars-- demanded with the help of water's chill. When I surfaced for air--instead of the comforting voices of people who talked so much that day humming over the surface--I made out a bit of a yelling conversation. One friend was rather angry about an MIA song sampling "Straight to Hell" a song by the Clash she'd grown up listening to while the other believed that you are always using something old when making something new. I surfaced and listened to the voices softened by the water ripples but carried over enough I could float on my back and hear.

Where collaboration went.


Something Older. Something better?

Every time I write my opinion about copyright law, I should have to cite that night. Who do I cite though? My friend's voices or the water rehashing sounds I'd heard before without paying for any of them or the muscle memory of my body so self-assured from years of floating on a lake that the motion had been perfected. In that moment, I knew that even though my friend could pinpoint the bit of the Clash within MIA's music enough that she was annoyed so much else went into that song that wasn't new. Everything has roots. No song begins in midair. No person starts as a tabula rasa.

Some genres even expect people to reuse notes or continue on a structure and even knowing where those came from we can't ever understand the entire genesis of an idea because so many other ideas were part of creating a new one and so much was there before that. While we can try to piece back the origins of everything our role as piecer changes everything and time does and sometimes just walking past a television saying something or other may imprint on us and show up later and we may not even know. I think there is value in knowing where things came from, but I don't know how anyone claims an original idea. They are not new. The things they saw, heard, did. The language they have to work in. The people they talked to. Their genes. Do we have to cite all of those things?

Of course I do my best to adhere to copyright laws, but in all the voices how do I know for sure which ones are in mine or when someone else has taken mine. Is it really taking? Should I cite the makers of my computer knowing my ideas come out differently on here than in a journal? I hope that my words appear in someone else. I love when a phrase starts being uttered regularly by a group of friends and no one knows who said it first or who said it to them. Should they trademark the words? What happens when a year later they meet someone else who has been saying the same phrase longer than any of them? Experience mostly overlaps. When we say mine mine mine, we forget how much is ours.