Blog Post 3

The abstract of Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s composition “Plagiarism, Originality, And Assemblage” states that today students live in a remix culture. By being brought up in this remix culture, students and professionals have taken to new approaches that remix older content into something new and creative. However this approach of assembling and remixing “asks teachers to reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions about plagiarism and originality.” Peter England was able to publish a work about how we might adopt remixing in music and architecture. The last chapter of his book was a literal rearrangement of different texts and was able to have this work published with out it being labeled as plagiarism. However there are times that works that have been remixed can face legal consequences depending on the case. For example danger mouse’s “Grey Album” received a cease and desist order by EMI who owned the rights of the Beatle’s White Album. The difference between plagiarism and originality is that plagiarism is using somebody else’s intellectual property and passing it off as one’s own, giving no credit to the actual creator. Originality can be as simple as paraphrasing an a passage so its not plagiarism, or can be a remix of various different sources and combining them to assemble something new and different.  There needs to be a push towards remixing as a valid form of creativity and production of writing. But as of now there is still a blurred line between the notion of creativity/remix and the legal web of plagiarism and copyright laws that rightly protect the original creator’s intellectual property.