CTRL + C
Recently I was taking my long pending MBA exams. For those of my friends who are curious to know when I’d complete it,
Haven’t you ever heard of five year plans?? Anyway, the fact of the matter is that a few of the elderly students (distance education is a euphemism for mudhiyor kalvi) found the exams a throwback to their student days. Understandably, they role played their school exam days by indulging in a technique as old as mankind – copying. It’s an irony that the same guy would’ve thrashed his school going kid left and right for the same offence.
What irked me was not the fact that he was copying, but that he was giving some other’s answer as his own.
“Idiot, both are one and the same!’ I hear you say but I’ll come to this later.
Moreover, he was using one of the greatest tools employed my mankind to learn anything for a purpose as trivial as clearing the MBA exam. Here was one arpa maanidan who never realized the value of copying. It’s like an Annaachi using a Yamaha 350 CC to get vegetables from Koyambedu market every morning. Bajaj M-80 was designed by a genius for a reason, stupid!
Seriously, at least according to me, learning involves some kind of activity or some doing. And any doing requires a kind of reference, imitation, guru, precedence, instruction, guidance, or tutorial. Right from the day we said “Amma” for the first time and including the thiruttu dhum during teens, it’s always been this - something or someone has been our inspiration. I have no qualms in admitting that I learnt my 2 anna design skills by copying. While the rest of the junta spent a few lakhs and 4 years in a design school, piravi medhais like me took screen shots from sites like templatemonster.com and tried to replicate the design correct to a pixel. Nowadays we do the same for flickr.com. The reference is different, but the process – you bet! But it’s another matter that we would never pass such copied works as our own. We ensure that we inherit from at least 20 different designers and mix and match in so many ways that it’s hard even for us to decide who has influenced us in what way to what extent.
On the other hand, there is hardly any concept which is more over hyped than originality. I mean, I think it’s more hyped than even ‘Sivaji’. Why do I say so? Let’s consider this.
A B C D…
Now, what was that? A? Alphabets? How do you know? How do I know? What if I started getting all too creative and original and wrote A,B upside down?? Will it communicate? Would you still understand?
Neither Deva nor half the world’s computer programmers would’ve survived if not for Ctrl + C.
The difference is that the good programmers always admitted that and inspired from so many sources whilst the lazy ones had one source, and what’s more hardly admitted that. The cardinal sin was not copying but pretending as if they had not and laziness.
There is a dialogue in Kurudhipunal which is a favorite of mine. “Dhariiyam ngradhu enna na, bayam illadha madhiri nadikaradhu”
The same way, the so called originality is derivative of ctrl+c. If you can copy from, say, 30 different sources so that no one source can claim that their work had influenced you completely (the more the better because invariably its more hard work), mix and match, know what to insert and what to leave, and can deliver an output which makes sense as a cohesive whole, then you fine. Subject to one condition though - mention that you had taken from the 30 different sources.
Give the deed of copying the dignity that it rightly deserves, please spread the virtues of Ctrl+C and make this world a better place.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:12 am
appo neenga enna sollareenga ? pakathulla irukaravanga answer papera paathu ezhudhina….acknowledgements..so and so nnu poda sollareengala ?
July 24th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Copy and Jumble up hundred different sources - End Result - Originality
Copy from one resource word to word - End Result - Plagiarism or Copying
Revisiting Kamal Hassan’s Kurudhi Punal Dialogue ” Originality na enna nu theriyuma, copy adichu maattikkaama irukkarathu!!”
July 25th, 2007 at 12:05 am
sree,
If examination is the place where you learn, then that’s what i meant
Chilli,
I’m saying there is no such thing as completely original. Being completely original is not such a desirable thing as it’s projected to be.
Kamal atleast takes inspiration from multiple sources for a single movie and knows how to process the same and dish out a cohesive whole.
In that sense he is original, according to me
July 25th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
If there were no such thing as originality, then there would be no need for copyright law. It’s precisely because there is such tremendous originality in everything.
Admittedly, if one takes your reductionist view, there can be nothing new under the sun. If a piece of music is _merely_ the sum of its components (12 basic notes, in this case), then it is true. However, I find nothing at all convincing about this argument. It seems to me, and pretty much the rest of the world, that a piece-of-music/word/sentence is more than the sum of its individual notes/letters/words. This is a very strange view to take.
When a musician composes music, the musician does not consciously “Ctrl+C” bits and pieces of other sources heard but, typically, comes up with something that _is_ original and different from the previous sources. This should be obvious to anyone. As I write these sentences, I do not form them by “Ctrl+C”ing words I have previously heard but in some otherway that is internal to my mind. The same is true of all your blog posts.
What Deva does is evident plagiarism because there is no thinking involved in his work. If I were to, say, produce a piece of music that were nothing but the concatenation of the first five seconds each of Mozart, Beethoven, the Indian National Anthem and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star that would also be plagiarism for reason unnecessary to elaborate upon. (Note that the same holds even if I had 400 sources and each was ‘only’ 1 second long.) None of this is what is done when we compose sentences or music.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
OGFT,
I dont want to get into the ‘consciously’ debate. bcos then we might have to get into q’s like if someone copies by ‘reflex’ and then if ‘reflex’ is completely voluntary or instinctive or whatever…i’m no professional psychologist either..
I think i wrote my conditions pretty clear when i said,”mix and match, know what to insert and what to leave, and can deliver an output which makes sense as a cohesive whole…”
You need not have Ctrl C ed whatever you typed because you may have
internalized the english language by virture of reading, school education and whatever for years together..basically you are employing what you learned by painstaking repetition, review tiral and error etc.
>>If I were to, say, produce a piece of music that were nothing but the concatenation of the first five seconds each of Mozart, Beethoven, the Indian National Anthem and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star that would also be plagiarism for reason unnecessary to elaborate upon.
I thought that’s what i meant when i said,” What to have and what to leave and to make sens as a cohesive whole”
Say if you were told to come up with some tune(BGM) to a tragedy scene in a masala movie and if you still use all the pieces of tune as you had mentioned,
does that make it fit to be called ‘original’ and ‘out of the world’?
I see that merely as a skill gained through experience and practice..
I am saying even to evoke a sad feeling, the tune should be familiar to the tune and instrument generally used to evoke a sad feeling in the past…
In general, more often than not, i find that people place undue emphasis on the so called ‘originality’ and some go to ridiculous extent just to be seen original..
I wanted to make a counter point and demystify the ‘creative’ aspect…
I am also of the view that all these copyright laws have done very little more than adding an aura to that copyright holder and have more often than not stood in front of sharing knowledge or information….
July 25th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Funny you seem to think that my knowledge of the “English language” has been “internalized” “by virture of reading, school education and whatever for years together”. Can the same be said of other languages? Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and so on? If language is “learned” purely “by virture of reading, school education and whatever”, then one is forced to admit that nobody in the world knows languages such as Tulu or Konkani which are scriptless. This “internaliz[ation]” breaks down when you consider oraters who were illiterate: former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Kamaraj, for instance; was his knowledge of Tamil incomplete?
In the case of creating a “BGM” in the way I described, the tune is unoriginal for the same reasons I previously mentioned.
I’m afraid I still don’t understand how you have “demystif[ied] the ‘creative’ aspect” of language. I do not know how you have the ability to come up with original and unique sentences that have not been uttered before or how I am able to comprehend them.
Let us consider your second example. For a tune to “evoke a sad feeling, the tune should be familiar to the tune and instrument generally used to evoke a sad feeling in the past.” If this were the case, then no originality is possible. However, in my experience, and again, what seems to be quite universal, I can attest that I have never been “taught” when a tune was “sad” or otherwise. If it were indeed taught, then I would not laugh or cry when seeing foreign films. In fact, I could not laugh because nobody has ever “taught” me what is funny and what is sad. (If you mean that I observed people cry when they heard the tune and so cry because I saw that, then you have an immensely broad definition for “learning”.)
We are in agreement about what constitutes unoriginal when a song is made from pieces of other songs but I am perplexed when you say, as in your response to Chilli, that “there is no such thing as completely original”. Is a sentence/song merely the reduction to words/notes?
If language is indeed only “learned by painstaking repetition”, I’m curious to know why animals do not speak English or Swahili as well as native English and Swahili speakers do. And why I, no matter how well I try, cannot speak French as well as French natives do, despite my “painstaking repetition” of the same and yet a French child speaks it fluently. It cannot be genetic because the children of Indian families settled in the US speak just like Americans.
Indeed, if language can be learned by anyone, then it is surprising that all attempts to teach language to apes have failed. It is surprising that Arnie’s and Antonio Banderas’s English are as strongly accented as they are, despite their continued exposure to only what one can call “American English”. If anything, these show that the faculty for language is innate if nothing else, that a child comes to a language rather than learns it. Notice that this is the same argument as in the case of other organ development. All humans reach puberty at a certain age, but nobody believes that this is because they “learned by painstaking repetition” to reach puberty. Rather, the definition is within the organism. Reaching puberty does not depend on company, you don’t reach it because all your friends are hitting puberty. We understand this in the case of other organs for us and other species. Why are language and musical ability any different?
Take your own proclamation that language is “learned”. How did you come to this conclusion if you did not “learn” this ‘fact’ anywhere?
July 25th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
OGFT
Obviously, we learn to say ‘amma’ before we even learn to write alphabets - be it english or tamil. If you really think learning to say Amma takes unbelievable originality and creativity, then i rest my case.
Your take on apes and humans is interesting…
I’m no chomsky to debate on the innate ability of humans as a species.
One can go on by this stretch, For e.g, “why dogs always bark no matter how hard we attempt to make him talk??”
On the other hand, take a street dog and take a police trained one Both are one and the same??
Regarding your take in music,
I can tell one example where IR’s BGM in one movie, (i think Veedu) was also used in How to Name it. When i listened to HTNI, i never felt it was such a sad tune..But it was a different feeling when i saw the movie along with the characters, situation and context etc.
Just because i am not able to detect the pattern does not mean there is no pattern at all?. At least i do not think so.
Going by your logic, can you explain why the average guy on the roads of Chennai does not like to hear Symphony whilst he likes to listen to the film songs?? IF music is after al such a universal thing, pls. try that to a guy who is not familiar with classical music ( western or carnatic). Will he listen to IR’s song or ARR ‘ songs or Beethoven?? If not, why not??
I always thought ‘Ragas’ concept is nothing but patterns in music more or less…
With that pattern and practice, a musician is able to come up with various permutations and combinations.. All musicians depend on Ragas to some extent. They fuse 2 ragas or more, but they need ragas to do the fusion in the first place…
I definitely have a very broad definition of learning and am not ashamed about that.
And I dont lose my sleep if the universe (supposedly entirely with you as you claim to be) does not support my view. I am writing a blog to say what i think, not to worry about if the universe is with me or with ppl like OGFT
Your school of thought says ‘Everything is completely original’. SInce i did not conduct any referendum i am clueless to the fact if the universe is entirely with you or not…
I still stick to that nothing is 100% original. It may be reductionist or whatever, but it doesn;t matter.. Till i read or come to know abt more compelling argument.
You had mentioned about Copyright laws, I would say Open Source software would not have come into vogue if it was as universal as you claim to be.
My logic and ideas maybe funny but yours is no less, atleast to me for now
July 26th, 2007 at 12:34 am
Your claims are all very (false, but) original. How can you make these claims when you haven’t learnt them anywhere? Before the arrival of Brahmins in South India, the Tamil spoken had no Sanskritic influences. In that time, the word for “mother” was “thai” (I presume). Certainly no child said “amma” during those times. There are several languages in the world where the word for “mother” does not have an “m” sound. Repeating a word itself takes no particular ’skill’, a tape recorder does a better job — maintaining tone and voice accurately. However, to generate grammatically correct sentences that are original (definitely to the child) yet infinite requires an innate ability.
Your example has nothing to do with “my take on music”. I merely said such ordered borrowing from several tunes into another would be plagiarism, not an original work.
“Going by your logic, can you explain why the average guy on the roads of Chennai does not” speak Swahili “whilst he” speaks Tamil?
“If” language “is after all such a universal thing, pls. try that to a guy who is not familiar with” Tamil (Coimbatore or Chennai dialect). “Will he” understand Kovai Sarala “or” Manorama “or” Yu Yamada? “If not, why not?”
I never implied that it was shameful to “have a very broad definition of learning”, it does indicate that the usage of “learning” then has no substance. If you associate the things that a child does merely by observation of people around it and then goes on to speak fully formed sentences with “learning” then the word is meaningless (and it means you agree with me). Note that this is the exact opposite of “employ[ing] what [I] have learned by painstaking repetition, review tiral and error etc.”
I have never claimed that “everything is original”. If you notice, I give some very clear examples of what constites plagiarism.
A further misunderstanding on your part regards, funnily enough, “Open Source”. Open Source Software cannot exist _without_ copyright. If you take a look at their website, you will notice that the Open Source License is a _Copyright License_. Thus Free Software and Open Source Software licenses strengthen my argument.
I do not think your “ideas” are “funny”. Merely naive and ignorant.
If nothing is original, what was the caveman’s equivalent to the Internet?
IIRC, Police dogs usually have their throat pipes operated upon so they cannot bark. Even otherwise, behavioral differences have been observed between different breeds of the dog species. So it is far from obvious that your police dog and street dog. Incidentally, I give up and would like to know the answer: “why dogs always bark no matter how hard we attempt to make [them] talk”?
BTW, what does OTFG mean?
July 26th, 2007 at 2:19 am
>>oneGeeFourTees — OGFT
not OTFG :))
Since i have some work i’ll ignore you for now..
btw why dont u start writing in a langauge created originally by you..
you can have the entire copyrights for that language.. i promise
and whats more you can communicate with the entire universe which is anyway behind you in this effort
we have argued from dogs to apes to music to language to whatever..
merely arguing for the sake of arguing does not take you anywhere my friend
if you think you know better than me, pls. write a detailed explanation in your blog and … that way i would also know more.. and someone more knowledgeble than you and me will give his/her gyaan too..
Ridiculing me does not take anybody anwhere..
BTW this is what i found under Wikipaedia
>>Important note: The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts and illustrations. It is therefore useless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce content. Permission to reproduce content under the license and technical conditions applicable to Wikipedia (see below and Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks) has already been granted to everyone without request;
Bottomline: you have to tell me - in your blog, if any that is..
July 26th, 2007 at 3:47 am
thappu pannittu accept panra kalaacharam daan namma kitta kedayave kedayaadhe..
having said that, Copy adichittu, ‘naan daan copy adichen’ nu sonna examiner mark poduvaana? illa university daan MBA kudukkuma…
btw, have you copied in the examination PK? if so, have you accepted that you have copied to the examiner or invigilator ?
July 26th, 2007 at 3:52 am
chakra,
>>Copy adichittu, ‘naan daan copy adichen’ nu sonna examiner mark poduvaana? illa university daan MBA kudukkuma…
“nalla” university a paarthu serndha, copy ellam adichu kasta pada venaam, avangale
eludhi thiruthi mark pottu pass pannniduvaanga
konjam investment reqd
school time 7th, 8th la adichirukken.. pakathile irukara payyan kitte keetu eludharadhu.. aprom ennamo konjam kevalama irundhudhu..
adhila irundhu panradhu illai
July 26th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Your argument is curious. You want to claim there is no such thing as originality and indicate some source which merely claims that it does not own the copyright to its content. By your standards, if I wanted to show that there were no women in the world, showing some photo of a man would suffice.
My apologies. I did not mean offense when I said you were ignorant. You are. That is just fact. My mistake that I didn’t write it out clearly that I did not mean it as an insult.
Once again you take your naive reductionist approach. I fail to see the point in “creating my own language”. Would you ask someone to compose music in ultrasound frequencies?
I do not have a blog since I cannot write as well as yourself. It is curious that you do not deem your own comment space worthy of reading. However I have told you, except not in my blog.
I have given several examples of the innate human ability to speak. You have not answered why other species fail at the same task. I have revealed your ignorance with regards to copyrights and Open Source Software licensing. These are places you could begin to read about, if nothing else. Of course, none of this is necessary in the least. But to make the claims you make, without “learn[ing] by painstaking repetition” and then to attribute them to a lack of “originality” is curious.
Another very simple point of beginning is to ask yourself about your own reductionist approach. Is music the sum of its individual notes or more? Is a word the concatenation of alphabets or more? Is a sentence the mere sequencing of many words?
I realize I did not make myself entirely clear on the topic of originality. When I mean original, I mean something that you have not encountered before. Your view seems to be something nobody has ever seen before. But even if we take your definition, I am not convinced it is correct, however it seems prudent if I point out the difference in our thinking. Perhaps then we may find common ground.
Continuing, to me a word is original if it has not been encountered earlier by me. Thus, the word “Quiddich” is original. A previously unencountered sentence is original. Likewise with music. (Plagiarism does not enter here.)
So, if I encounter a sentence that I have not read or heard elsewhere or write a sentence I have not used earlier, it is original. You may ask yourself about this. Do you think about which (previously encountered) word you must use when forming a sentence? Are you analyzing current choices at some stage in the middle of a sentence?
July 26th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
>> youare naive and ignorant and its a fact.
shall we say verified by OGFT
After 4 comments you have at last ventued to give one definition. It has not sunk in to me as yet (as you claim, i’m being naive and ignorant and its a fact) it may at a later date. nothing is etched in stone..
i’ve adopted Ideas which i felt stupid during my earlier days…the same can happen here too..
but right now your definition does not make sense to me..
“quiddich” - since you have not heard of it so its original?
I think it sounds more like kiddish (which i’ve heard before) and its only a minor variant of it…
what sounds original to you may not be so original to me.. or to some other person.. so who is the yardstick?? you?
I remember Ilayaraja once said that ‘isai naave eemathura velai dhaan’
if IR can say that, it just made me think longer and harder about it..
bloggers have questions and some opinions - some objective and some not so objective… its just that we post it in our blog..
that does not mean we are authoritative in that subject unless we explicitly proclaim tobe so…
“why do you write’ nu kekuradhu ellam waste…
.. we post just like the way you comment that does not make us experts in something..nor does it mean we are idiots.
i think the reality is we are somewhere between the two..
Thanks for responding and I will be going to another post.
July 26th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
I never asked you why you or other bloggers wrote. I said I did not have a blog because I cannot write as well or as often as you bloggers do.
Neither did I say you were an idiot. Garry Kasparov is an undeniably intelligent man yet he is, I am sure, ignorant about the latest findings in, say, nuclear physics; he is even more ignorant about Tamil literature (don’t you wonder why he wouldn’t appreciate the nuances of Tholkapiyam?). Ignorance does not imply lack of intelligence.
I think you’ll agree with me that there is no point discussing things with an idiot. That I continue to discuss this with you, I think, proves that I don’t think you’re an idiot. (Of course, if I’m an idiot, then the argument collapses on me. Though it is hard to find an objective meaning for idiot.)
Quidditch. I see you are ignorant about the Harry Potter universe
J. K. Rowling has invented the word “Muggle” which has made into the OED (hint: you are one). The word is obviously original. As is Quidditch, btw. As a reductionist you will probably reduce it to a partial sum of it’s parts. (A process which involves some degree of originality, I might add since you must pick and choose the components to include and exclude.)
I am surprised at your interpretation of Quidditch as “kiddish”. If I gave you the German word “baum” would you associate it with the near phonetic equivalent in English: “balm”? That is very curious since the word translates to “tree”.
I respect bloggers and admire them too. As mentioned earlier, I cannot write as well as you do and neither can I keep at it consistently.
If you are interested in some innate abilities among humans, you could read http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom07/bloom07_index.html
Great fans of Illayaraja can identify any song of his by listening to any piece of any nearly every song of his. If none of them were original, this would not be possible. If all songs were, as you claim, unoriginal plagiarisms off “earlier” works (was the first one original?), then why _doesn’t_ the lay person in the streets of Chennai appreciate Beethoven as much as IR? How is it that one can clearly identify some songs as belonging to IR’s 80s collection, some as belonging to ARR’s first 5 years and so on, if there is no originality or uniqueness to their style?
July 26th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
OGFT
in your previous comments i read that you’d mentioned
‘How can you make these claims when you haven’t learnt them anywhere?’
my response abt bloggers was to that…
>>The word is obviously original.
Dhoda! whats the benchmark i still dont know.
To be honest I’m more confused abt originality now. Your argument on music and IR and beethoven has again taken things to square one..
And yes I’m completely, absolutely ignorant about harry potter universe.
thanks for the link..
btw innate skills kum originality kum enna sambandam??
will read this at leisure and find out
Probably i’ll write a post on this at a later day when i have some more gyaan and more imptly time..
I will remember to give you credit for opening my eyes, if my ideas change in the meanwhile
July 27th, 2007 at 12:39 am
You are correct when you ask what relationship there is between innateness and originality (none). Our vision systems are pretty much innately defined however, no-one, (not even I) would call them “original”.
Your definition for originality is extremely narrow. If something, say X, (it could be some music, a word or a sentence) has been expressed by someone, then it loses all claims for future originality (sort of like a perpetual copyright). You go farther than that and say that even if X itself has not been expressed earlier, it can be reduced to the sum of its parts and therefore loses all claims towards originality.
Say, the word Muggle. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been used as a word in English history. So it is original. It seems to me you would say that the word uses the letters e, g, l, m and u, which themselves are _not_ original therefore the word isn’t either. (I could have misunderstood you, correct me if I’m wrong.)
My own definition is broader. If you say X and I too say (exactly the same) X and we arrive at it independently (without the knowledge that the other had done the same), then we have both come up with something original, even though it be the same. Take the case of the telephone where Bell and Gray raced to the patent office, I would claim that both came up with an “original” idea. Or take the invention/discovery of calculus by Leibniz and Newton. Newton invented/discovered it a full 15 years after Leibniz but he was unaware of the formers work when he published his own findings. Here too I would say they came up with original works.
Of course, in the case of mathematics or technology, where there is pretty much only “one possible way” originality is not a very hard criterion to make.
Since we are biological creatures, i.e. part of nature as much as the earthworm is, we have only a limited set of sounds available to us — vast but finite. (For example we cannot hear or voice ultrasound frequencies.) Keeping narrowly to our vocal abilities, we do come up with sentences that are “original” in the sense I defined: sentences that, to your knowledge at least, have never been used before. The kind that have our English teachers burst an artery, for instance
In fact, I can give you a pretty concrete example of pure originality. Just look up the Wikipedia article for “Nicaraguan Sign Language”. It is a case where deaf and dumb children who had not been exposed to any language have, in the course of around 30 years, developed a new language. They’ve invented it, in fact. Here, children invented the language, developed it and honed it in waves. The younger children did better than the older ones.
When I referred to your blogging, I was pointing out that you _have_ written a lot (3 years at least, by the looks of it), and in these writings there is a lot that is original in the broader sense. Also, I’m willing to wager that no sentence in your writings will be the same as a sentence in, say, G. B. Shaw’s writings; or a peer of yours: a fellow Tamilian, Chennai-ite blogger unless you were explicitly quoting this person. That’s remarkable originality there.
February 16th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article CTRL + C, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.