Remakes, Revizzes, and Revamps – Who Owns what in a Creative Commons World?

Like too many things, I wrote this a long time ago, sat on it, and never released it.  I figured it’d make a good distraction this week.

In school, they tell you: don’t plagiarize.  For some of us, the fear of even the perception of stealing is so massive, we do the opposite – we cite everything.

Enter the world of Wikipedia.  Crowdsourced, crowd-built, and crowd-governed in many ways, Wiki popularized the notion of Creative Commons.  Wiki tells me Creative Commons was designed support and encourage collaboratively creating what would traditionally be copyrighted IP.

As more and more of us share our work online and openly, the questions around ownership and attribution start to pour in. And it’s not just me asking. As we build progressively off each other, the lines get quite blurry. Add to that that some of the greatest epiphanies occur not from creating from scratch, but from remixing or building from something already in existence.

Defining Lines

So what happens when we create work that relies on something else?  How much of a debt do we owe?  Does it make a difference if it’s a remake, reviz, or a revamp of either or someone else’s work?  At what point does it become something new?

One of my most famous dashboards is a remake.  This is not news.

This dashboard certainly looks different.  The colors are different.  The formatting is different.  The top charts are different.  The order on the bottom is different.  But the underlying analysis and the presumed intentionality, as part of the exercise, is still unchanged.  The actions weren’t changed, only called out.  So is this different?

I’ve used this dashboard as the basis for my linguistics model.  It certainly cemented a lot of loose ends in my head.  I’ve recolored it, rearranged it, and changed the breaks and paths that the eye can make with it.  I’ve swapped charts and changed nearly everything on it at least once.

Does reformatting it alone make it mine? 

You can see above the 2 different versions.  The spacing and placement between the formatted one are different, as are the colors.  The lines are quieted down and the contrast is removed.  There’s header and font differences and the use of separate charts, rather than titles, for the KPI exists within this version.  Is this an edit or a remake at this point?  I personally don’t have a solid answer.  If I had just done this, I don’t know that I personally would feel I have that much claim to it.  It certainly matches my style.  But I can’t say definitively that formatting alone is enough to make it mine.

Does the process matter? 

When I created this, some of the first things I did were merge and change charts.  I spent a fair bit of time considering color and ensuring it was meaningful.  I ripped out reference lines, changed titles, and added KPIs to make it flow the way I wanted to.  I adjusted bar sizes, map metrics, and added an icon.  I moved stuff around and was extremely intentional about where things were placed.  I softened the dashboard to the fuzzy grey background and posted the dashboard that has become synonymous with my style.

But is it (truly) mine?

At this point, I’d personally argue it is.  It certainly stands out.  It’s definitely kicked off what’s become quite the adventure.  But, it’s always been mine like I Will Always Love You has belonged to Whitney Houston.  She certainly wasn’t the first person to do that song – that honor goes to Dolly Parton, who also wrote the song.  But, ask me to name top-of-mind songs for Whitney Houston, and perhaps with the exception with I Wanna Dance with Somebody, that song would be top of the list.  Dolly gets Jolene, 9-5, and a host of others, but her original version of that song doesn’t hit my list.  That doesn’t mean that’s true for everyone.

Do we create in isolation?

Perhaps, the larger question is what does it take to create? How much do we rely on existing innovations in order to make our own?

My work has – and always will – a debt owed to Kelly Martin. She crystallized a style of presentation that is woven heavily in the work I do. My work also picks up notes of influences from people like Lindsey Poulter – who in my mind, completely owns the legacy of parameter and set action UI – and Lilach Manheim – who forever cemented metaphoric vizzing as an art form. My analysis cycle looks to Candra McRae, who deeply examines her analysis, but also to the legacy and history of Michael Cristiani, who loved when we put ourselves in the viz. We exist within the context of each other, our work a conversation, a capturing of a moment in time, and one that ideally sparks throughout.

Perhaps, the larger concern goes to memory. The Ethics of Memory discusses whose histories we remember as our own, the names forever sealed as heroes in our world. What happens – this book challenges us – if our actions are remembered as a collective, but our names are lost? It mentions we can die twice – a physical death, yes, but also when our name is no longer remembered.

In the Deaf community, you trace your “lineage” by your introduction to the Deaf community. For many Deaf individuals, this is often by school and for a very select few, their parents. Outsiders, like myself, reference friends who brought them in, teachers, and various school programs. These connections are your lineage, your history, and the memory of your ties. My story is always tethered to Katy, Mary, Trish, Chrissymia, Daniel and the others who came before. Half of these people exist in memory only.

As creators, we long for our fingerprints to last, our stories celebrated like Giorgio Moroder, a man who can safely claim the invention of 2 music genres. Most of us, though, are not Giorgio. Many of us are Daft Punk – creators with a debt owed to a true innovator, a person we emulate, but never duplicate. Ask me, and I’ll tell you Kelly Martin was a Giorgio, a true innovator and pioneer in the Tableau world. I’m a happy Daft Punk.

I own my creations, but they are not without heavy influence others. They, like me, owe a world of debt to others. It’s collaborative, reliant on others to spark thoughts and questions. I can only assume that’s what ownership looks like in a creative commons world: one where we own pieces, but the whole is a larger quilt of our society.