Arts + Labs advisor Andrew Keen talks about plagiarism in his latest essay entitled "Hunger Artists" at Barnes & Noble Review:

Words have once again become subversive. Last February, when Helene Hegemann, the 17-year-old German author of the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll "novel" Axolotl Roadkill, was said to have plagiarized portions of this 2010 book from a blogger, she responded by hurling a grenade of a sentence back at her accusers.

"There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," the Berlin-based writer said, ironically issuing this subversive statement through her venerable publisher Ullstein-Verlag, a business which, for nearly 140 years, has been predicated upon selling copies of its authors' original words.

Note that Hegemann didn't just place authenticity above originality within her pantheon of creative values. The teenage writer's statement actually denies that originality--a central assumption of the creative economy for the past 150 years--exists.

 "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity."

In Hegemann's creative universe, where it's impossible to be original because everything has been said before, all that is left for the author to cultivate is the virtue of individual authenticity by, it seems, transparently reorganizing other people's work. But in the shadow of the death sentence Hegemann imposes upon originality, what distinguishes authentic from inauthentic writing?

According to Hegemann, it's the uniqueness of the author's organization of other people's material, rather than the uniqueness of his or her writing, which defines authenticity. As she told the daily newspaper Berliner Morgenpost, "I myself don't feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context and from the outset consistently promoted the fact that none of that is actually by me."

 
Read the entire article here.

Congressman Bob Goodlatte is the nine term Republican representative for the 6th District of Virginia. As the Co-Chairman of both the bipartisan Congressional Internet Caucus and the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus as well as Chairman of the House Republican High Technology Working Group, Goodlatte wields considerable influence in the shaping of government policy toward the Internet. Here's a politician, then, with much power to determine the future of creativity. So when I sat down with Goodlatte in Washington, DC earlier this month, I talked to the Congressman about piracy, copyright law and the future of innovation on the Internet. -Andrew Keen

Art's + Labs advisor Andrew Keen participated in a debate at the National Press Club on the discuss the topic "Is democracy threatened by the unchecked nature of information on the Internet?"

Here are some of the highlights:

On the notion that the web can harm democracy:

It depends, of course, what you mean by democracy. Jimmy [Wales]'s definition of democracy was an anti-federalist position, a sort of an idealized, direct-democracy rhetoric which suggests (and I'm quoting him now) that "It's all about the people deciding." But of course at the foundation this country is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy, in which the federalists won over the anti-federalists.

The premise of democracy is not about the people deciding; it's about finding educated, high-quality political figures who will make wise decisions about the community. So I think Jimmy is falling into the old trap of appropriating democracy for his own ends.

On the notion that the Internet is, fundamentally, technology:

One of the mistakes we make about the Internet is that it's technology. It isn't; it's ideology. The Internet was built by people who questioned authority. The Internet is bound up in a fundamental assault on the notion of expertise, on what Jimmy calls 'the mainstream media,' which includes shows like this, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. And the idea that representative democracy, experts -- whether in media, in politics, in the arts, in legal affairs, in intellectual affairs -- are unreliable and need to be replaced by what Jimmy calls 'the people' is deeply dangerous.

What I most fear about the Internet -- which...we all use; I'm as addicted as everybody else -- is the way we take this technology, which has no center, is flattened, has done away with authority and expertise -- we take this technology to prove the ideological, idealized theories of Jimmy Wales. The truth is, we need expertise, we need authority, we need to remind ourselves of the foundations of representative democracy."

Read more here.

A debate on the topic "Internet and Democracy: Democracy is threatened by the unchecked nature of information on the Internet."  will be held tonight at 7 PM ET at the National Press Club.  The event can be viewed live online by visiting the Miller Center of Public Affairs.

The debate will be moderated by Paul Solman, Business and Economics Correspondent, PBS NewsHour, and the participants will include:

Andrew Keen, Arts + Labs advisor and author of "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture"

Farhad Manjoo, journalist for Slate, and author of "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society"

Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia

Micah L. Sifry, editor, Personal Democracy Forum

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult Of The Amateur, led the discussion which included Richard Bennett (research fellow at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation), Larry Downes (fellow of the Stanford Law School Center For Internet & Society), Michael Masnick (CEO and Founder of Techdirt) and Gigi Sohn (CEO and Founder of Public Knowledge, who came in on Skype).