China has been widely criticized for its soft stance on protecting intellectual property rights. Take a walk inside the wholesale distribution buildings of Guangzhou and you’ll see an abundance of liberally hijacked designer-driven goods. Here, you’ll see that "limited edition" is a marketing myth. Anything from Munnys, Dunnys, Adicolor sneakers, shirts, handicrafts and trading cards runneth over. So what’s new? It’s that people are now starting to realize that piracy not only allows rapid copying of someone else’s product, it also allows them to play around with the product design while doing it. Size, shape, color and form can be freely customized at very low cost (e.g. pink Mickey Mouse-Hello Kitty mash-up toy).
The Economist reports similar pirate remixing in the art world:
The gallery owner says he can replace a disciple in Leonardo Da Vinci’s "Last Supper" with Mary Magdalene – fans of Dan Brown’s "The Da Vinci Code" have been asking for that. Other tourists like Leonardo’s "Mona Lisa" with Chinese characteristics and a toothy leer or Van Gogh’s "Sunflowers" – the most popular seller in Dafen – painted in blue.
So once again we see more things becoming bendable to the consumer’s will. Ironically, piracy may have opened up a whole new way of democratizing design. Imagine a whole new industry run by product DJs that specialize in reconfiguring iconic objects with fragments of obscure ones and original concepts.
If there comes a point in music where customized copying from multiple parts of other people’s audio bits constitutes a legitimately original song, can there also be a point in piracy where enough original input legitimizes it? Can piracy be transformed into pop pastiche?
What’s next? Cheap inventive mash-ups of pirated software and video games?
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