Warren Ellis' Night Signals

If you're getting Warren Ellis' Bad Signal, then you got this today. Now, not only is the second paragraph about the coolest bit of flavor I've seen in ages, but the whole thing takes a fantastic turn for the relevant (for any creator anyway) in paragraph 4. Copyrights aren't restrictions, they're protection. They give creators the right to see a vision through on their own terms and for their own reasons. Creators pay for their ideas. Respect is the currency of the creative economy and without it the whole damn process falls apart. Imagine the worst infringement you've seen. Now imagine a world where that's commonplace, where ideas have no value and everything is stolen noise. Me? I'll pass.

bad signal
ME

*  It occurs to me  that, should you imagine a black-and-white
comic book without ever having  seen one, you would not
imagine it having a colour cover.

* Hauntology  on paper: at the ends of long corridors, 
black-and-white illustrations from  pulps and penny dreadfuls,
distorted by age and photocopier to emulate  crackle in
audio.  Ghost stories haunted by the ghosts of old  ghost
stories, 21st Century London haunted by woodcuts of
19th Century  London reflected in windows and puddles.

* I'm sorry, small beady-eyed  insipid man with a baby
hard-on for Marxist theory, but I'm pretty sure that  when
Burial recorded "Raver" he wasn't conducting a critique
of modern  capitalism.  Not everything is a market.  To
attempt to capture the  ghost of a scene is not an
expression of the chains of the dominant  ideology,
and neither are field recordings of London at 3am.   Also,
you have the voice of a eunuch meerkat, the physical
presence of a  sparrow fart at dawn, and you have
cunts for eyes.

*  The  creative commons is all around us.  Any creative mind
reaches a point  where it realises that its work is part of an
ongoing cultural  conversation.

*  We are all the product of -- at the head of the  notional 
genestream of -- generations upon generations of culture.   
We all take from what's around us to make our art.  We
engage in the  conversation.  Raise our voices.  And we
identify our voice with a  copyright mark.  That isn't some
hideous, stultifying lock on the  culture.  The commons
*is* the cultural conversation.  You want to  join in?  Get
up on your hind legs and do it.  Get your own  copyright
mark.  So the next person along knows that they have
to  speak for themselves and identify their voice, rather
than using your words  and pretending it's them.

*  If the fact that Mickey Mouse will be  under copyright
control for the next thousand years really bugs you?
Kill  yourself.  You're no use to me or anyone else.
It's fun when things drop  out of copyright, sure.  But
it's not *important* to the process of  creation.  I could
easily cause to be created illustrations in the  styles of
penny dreadfuls and woodcuts to achieve the same
hauntological  effects.  It's just a way to instantiate
an idea.  I'm not going to  roll on the floor and curse
Western society for a cultural jailer because it  turns
out someone still has the rights to the illustration for
an old MR  James story or something.  The world is
not broken because you can't  make your own Mickey
Mouse cartoons (and frankly, if you could,  YouTube
would already be broken under the weight of LOLMickeys
and Mickey  Mouse Buttsecks and WineMickeyMouse
videos).

*  If you really  need some legal language to help yourself
feel good about the state of being  a 15 year old in an art 
class making a collage out of newspaper clippings...  well,
great.  That was great fun when we were 15, right?   But
listen.  The mark of being an adult is to internalise our  
influences and express them through our own personalities 
and  filters.  The last thing our culture needs is a licence 
to be 15  forever.