Compiling as a Creative Act: What Duke Ellington’s Remixing Reveals about Plagiarism and Innovation — brainpickings.org

Is genius a mosaic of “magpielike borrowings”? It has been said that everything is a remix. Even Mark Twain maintained that “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” But while it may be a matter of degree rather than kind, surely there must be a difference between unabashed plagiarism and the inevitable derivativeness of acknowledging that everything builds on what came before.

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