>> Lili Cheng: This is Andres -- and I have a hard time -- Monroy-Hernandez.
Did I say it right?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yes.
>> Lili Cheng: Who has been doing some awesome work on authoring tools at
MIT, and particularly around building community and just understanding what
people are trying to do with these tools.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right.
>> Lili Cheng: And so yay.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Thank you. Thanks a lot for coming. So again
my name is Andres Monroy. I'm a PhD candidate at the Media Lab at MIT. And
today I'm going to be talking about one of the areas of my research focusing on
designing for remixing around online communities.
So -- it's not working. So just first I wanted to acknowledge some of my
collaborators. So for the past four years I've been working on this project, and
it's been, you know, really the result of work by many, many people, and as well
as some of our sponsors.
So, you know, very briefly the -- what I'm going to be talking about today is just
five -- five areas. First, you know, giving an introduction, a background on why
studying remixing and why it's important. Then, you know, focusing on some of
the research questions around the work that I've been doing. And then
describing the specific environment, where I've been doing this research, which
is the Scratch Online Community. And then, you know, talking about some of the
design interventions, design experiments and studies that we've done on this
community. And, you know, at the end you're given a kind of a overview of these
research.
So just in terms of, you know, social creativity and social production is one of the
areas that I'm really interested in studying. And when you think about that, you
know, the first thing that at least comes to my mind is things like the free
enterprise software community that for a very long time now have been engaged
in, you know, building things in groups that, you know, probably one particular
individual couldn't have built by themselves and this is, you know, a great
example of this type of work.
But of course, you know, now we have, you know, Wikipedia, and there is like
tons of research around Wikipedia, both in, you know, trying to understand
motivations, trying to understand why is it that Wikipedia succeeded and not
other things.
So, you know, Wikipedia is now kind of the [inaudible] of social software in some
ways. And there is really a lot of interest trying to understand how these systems
work and how to design these systems.
But to me more than just like software or, you know, building encyclopedias what
I find really interesting is, you know, engaging amateurs. And, you know, as
much as these systems are open really the kind of people that are involved in
these are, you know, non-traditional people in some ways, you know, very geeky
perhaps or, you know, software engineers or people who are really interested in
knowledge. But there is a lot of other work on, you know, more amateurs
creating work and sharing them online. So things like YouTube, Flickr, all this
kind of social media space which is all about, you know, building something,
putting it out there.
And what I find interesting about this is not just, you know, that anyone can share
their videos or whatever but that really all the things that are there are, you know,
open for being remixed in many ways. So for this -- for any particular video that
you might see, in particular the ones that are very popular like this one, you'll see
a lot of remixes that people have created of them.
So, you know, for this baby video you have like the Kanye version, then you
have, you know, the SPARTA version from the movie SPARTA and, you know,
tons of remixes for any video that that has gotten more than, you know, probably
2,000 views then you'll find some kind of funny remix or maybe sometime serious
remixes. And this is what I find really fascinating about these systems and one of
the areas that I've been focusing on, you know, how to expand the range of
people and kind of democratize creation in these spaces.
So this is not something new, in fact, Yochai Benkler in his book The Wealth of
Networks describes how, you know, free enterprise software, Wikipedia, all these
kind of peer production systems are not just about software or just about
encyclopedias, they actually are a new form of economic production. And, you
know, he calls this a commons-based peer production, and he describes how,
you know, these network environments really allow for these type of, you know,
social creativity to flourish.
Then also, you know, kind of in the same vein Henry Jenkins talks a lot about,
you know, what does it mean for culture, not just in terms of the economy that
Benkler talks about, what does it mean for culture. And he talks about, you
know, these convergence of amateurs and professionals coming together and
building really interesting stuff.
But also, you know, people have pointed out that how our current, you know,
legal and economic system is really kind of flawed and is not really well designed
to support these what Lessig calls remix culture. And, you know, he argues that
there needs to be some change, and he proposes the Creative Commons and so
on.
But really, you know, you get this perspective from like the kind of economic
production environment or like a kind of point of view. The cultural one and then
looking at this ecosystem that has different components. So Lessig actually talks
really about how the legal aspect of this is just one aspect of it, the technical
infrastructure that supports this system is also really important thing, component,
and then there are the normative and cultural areas around this.
So one of the interesting things about social production is not just about
producing, you know, product software encyclopedias, but the process by which
this happens. And this is one of the things that I'm really interested in because
even if you at the end produce a -- if we get together and we try to make
something, even if we don't end up making whatever we decided to make, the
process by which we kind of engage in this kind of social creation, it's really a
very, you know, interesting learning experience. So typically location has been
always about, you know, something this like where, you know, people giving
lectures or whatever.
But really, you know, a lot of research, in particular, you know, Seymour Papert is
one of the kind of -- refers people who talked about this idea of learning by
building. I mean, it's not a new idea, but the idea that people learn the best when
they are building something that is personally meaningful to them in the context
of a social group.
And there is some work by Lave and Wenger also that talk about these ideas of
communities of practice and how people -- you know, they actually went to, you
know, Africa and all these different places trying to see how groups of people
come together and build stuff together and how this process is a very -- is a great
model for learning that, unfortunately, hasn't been kind of translated to the, you
know, schools and this environment.
And more recently Henry Jenkins again talks about, you know, what he considers
the core literacy skills that people still have for the 21st Century. And he actually
describes that appropriation or remixing is one of these kind of core ideas. He
says, you know, the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media is, you know,
is one of those things that kids and adults of today should kind of have.
So, you know, more from the design point of view there is all these kind of social
production environments happen thanks to, you know, technology in some ways,
not only because of technology but happening in technologically, you know,
empowered environments.
So there is some work around, you know, how to create these type of systems,
actually some work by Yahoo Research where they looked at this website called
jumpcut. I don't know if you ever saw that one. It doesn't exist anymore,
unfortunately. But it was a really cool website, kind of like YouTube. But having
you saw there was remixable in some ways.
So even the internals of a particular video could be decomposed and taken apart,
and you could reuse them to create your own thing.
There is also some work on, you know, music remixing on this community called
CCmixter. And there is, you know, of course a lot of work on Wikipedia and other
systems like that.
So what I'm focusing on is in the idea of remixing in the sense of, you know,
people building something out of pieces that already exist. And it could be
pieces that somebody else made. And this idea of remixing is not new. I mean,
there is a lot of different terms and different fields. You know, if you talk to
programmers, you might talk about forking or forks.
If you talk to, you know, DJs or video DJs, they talk about mashups. There is
appropriation art, you know, from post-modernist art that is different words for the
same kind of phenomena where people are, you know, building on existing work.
And what I think is key about remixing is that it's social. You know, it's not just
about being alone and making stuff. And it's a really nice example in some ways
of online collaboration and how it can happen. And it's creative as well.
So just kind of to recap, there is, you know, I'm interested in this idea of how to
design these systems in the context of their social and cultural environments for
the purpose of supporting a particular kind of philosophical view of learning in a
more kind of constructivist learning.
So just in terms of kind of the broad research questions that I'm focused on, you
know, again, I'm interested in, you know, how to design these sociotechnical
systems, you know, systems that don't -- not only rely on technology but rely on,
you know, people that support these collaboration through remixing.
And in particular I'm three things. The first one is, you know, what are the
structural properties of these systems, you know, what are the key ingredients
from the technology point of view, from the architectural, from the social aspects
that make these systems work.
And second, you know, what are the roles that remixing plays in the cultural of
these environments.
And third, you know, what are people's attitudes towards remixing, how people
feel, how amateur creators feel about remixing. We hear a lot about what, you
know, corporations think about remixing. You know, oftentimes they are not very
happy about it. But we don't often hear what, you know, young people or
amateurs think about it.
So in order to kind of focus on these questions, I -- you know, you could take an
approach of, you know, studying a lot of these really interesting environments.
Or what I did was actually build a community where people engaged in this type
of social production. And this communicated is called Scratch. How many of you
have seen Scratch before? So, yeah, a lot of you.
So I'm just going to go very quickly. The idea of Scratch is an online community
where kids can share their own animations, video games, you know, interactive
art. There is tons of projects, you know, projects from animation, animated
videos, music videos to, you know, physics simulations to, you know, more kind
of interactive art kind of things.
And one of the cool things about Scratch is that everything that people upload
there is downloadable. And you can see how it was made.
So just to give you an example, this is one particular project -- let me see. And
this project was -- you know, you could download it and, you know, see how it
was made within the desktop application of Scratch. You can, you know, change
stuff, move it around and make your own version of it.
So, for example, this project was remixed by some kid and they -- you know, you
could see that they change the spaceship for, you know, the picture of John
McCain. This was around the election. And, you know, this is the kind of things
that we see often happening, not like changes in the aesthetics of the project as
well as the code. And this is kind of one way in which people participate in the
community. And one of the cool things about this site, just like any other, you
know, social media site, you can, you know, leave comments on people's
projects and say, you know, oh, this is really funny or whatever.
So, you know, in the past four years since we released the website we have now
more than 1.8 million projects and, you know, projects from people from all over
the world. And what is really cool is that 25 percent of the projects are remixes of
other projects in the community. So remixing is really a really important form of
participation.
There is, you know, 800,000 people who have registered, and about 200,000 of
them have made a project, which is pretty high, you know, compared to other
systems.
You know, in terms of the activity month to month, we have about 65,000 new
projects in March. And what is interesting is, you know, is the rate of remixes,
you know, pretty much stays the same except in this spike. But overall it stays
the same in terms of, you know, the percentage of remixes over the total number
of projects.
You know, in terms of people who are using the community, it's primarily kids.
You see, you know, from 11 to 17, 19, this is the primary, you know, age range.
The most is 14 years old. And so you see that a lot of these kids are, you know,
in middle school or early high school.
>>: [inaudible] the red and the blue?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: So red is males -- I'm sorry, red is females and
blue is males. So, yeah, you can see the distribution is somewhat even.
So one of the things that I've been doing around Scratch is not just build this
community and, you know, seeing how people use it. I've been studying how
people are using it, and I've also been doing some design experiments. So one
of the first things that we saw, actually this was three months -- three years and
nine months ago, we saw kids sharing not only projects like, you know, animation
or games, they were also sharing these kind of things were like more like
templates that they invited other people to read.
So you can see here in the notes it says, you know, here are simple walking
sprites. So these were like a collection of sprites, you know, people walking,
there was a bird flying, things like that. And then she says, you know, they're
perfect for platform games, you know, kind of inviting people to say, you know,
you could reuse them in your games. And then she said if you want a sprite of
your very own, leave a comment in my gallery and I can, you know, make it for
you. So we start seeing a lot of this kind of service in some ways, kids providing
services of making things for other kids.
So this project actually got this comment from this other girl who says, you know,
thanks a lot, I would like to have a background for my game. And then she
explains that she's making a company. She says it's not a real company. She
calls it Crank, Inc. And she basically says, you know, I'm making these games,
and I want to have like a group of people doing this work.
And what was interesting is that they both started to collaborate. So, you know,
one girl will make the kind of sprites, the drawings and the movements, and the
other girl will integrate them and put them into a game.
So this went on for a few -- a few days, a few weeks. And then other kids started
to notice, and they became really excited and they wanted to join. So they had to
-- you know, they had to kind of filter out the applicants.
So they started to request a portfolio. They had to explain what kind of skills they
will bring to the group. So it was really just interesting to see this emerge.
So in a few weeks after they released their first, you know, project, we started
seeing people from, you know -- there was this kid from New Jersey, this kid from
Ireland, people from Russia. They were like lots of kids participating in this
group, yet they never met each other before. They had these kind of assigned
roles that they gave to each other. And, you know, it could grow but not too
much because, you know, these groups have to be somewhat small.
So but what happened is because, you know, this group was somewhat crowded
is that other kids were like, well, if I cannot join Crank, Inc., I'm going to make my
own company. So then other kids started to make their own kind of, quote,
companies. And then this became like a, you know -- kind of like a form of
participation in the community. So kids now saw these kind of company making
as a cool thing to do and a way that they could start in Scratch.
So we studied one of these particular companies, one called Grey, Bear
Productions. So this company we studied over three months, and during this
three months that we looked at it, they developed six projects. And about each
project in average had 17 remixes that they -- they had to create in order to
release that project. So you can see here is, you know, like different versions of
the same project, each one of them was a remix of the other.
And the way that you're remixing was a kind of I will start my prototype and I will
say, you know, here is Lili, you know, you can change it and make your own, you
know, version. And we will talk over the comments of the galleries where they
kind of interacted of where -- what is the next step and who is going to do what.
So they kind of divided labor in this way.
But one of the things that we saw is that, you know, remixing was a real
interesting and great and positive way of engaging the community. So we saw,
you know, kids who said things like oh, I love what you did with my project with
your remix.
We also saw a lot of like negative aspects of remixing, things like, you know,
you're copycat or, you know, hello, Mr. Plagiarist, is this real close from the
website. Or this one like, you know, somebody was really upset about their
project being remixed. They were like this is not okay. I'm not okay with you
taking my work.
So we decided to first try to see how often this happened. And one of the other
things that we saw is that there were kids actually creating groups to fight the
copycats. So they were the Copy Cat Cops was one of these groups. And these
were kids, you know, creating these missions where they were going around the
website browsing and seeing if there were any kind of illegal remixes.
So then we looked at the kind of range -- we took a sample of projects and tried
to see how people react to remixing. So we found that, you know, the negative
and the positive were pretty similar, you know. And there were a lot of people
who reacted positively. But there was also a lot of people who were not very
happy about remixing.
We looked at things like, you know, what predicts these positive outcome of
remixing. And one of the things -- or what predicts negative outcomes. So one
of the things that we saw is that, you know, when people invested a lot of time
making their projects, if -- the more complicated the project was, the more likely
they were to complain about remixes of their projects.
The other thing that we found which was really interesting is that if people had
remixed themselves, like if they had engaged in remixing before, they could still
complain about remixing. Like it didn't really matter. Like people were kind of -they had -- yes?
>>: Two questions. What did you see in age dependence with respect to the
positive [inaudible]; and the other is that Scratch is a built-in attribution
mechanism, right, so you'll see what -- so even if someone steals it, like, they
would still see the change.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. This is the next
study that we did.
>>: Oh, okay.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Because we didn't have that feature before.
>>: Oh, you didn't.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: So this is an intervention -- it's kind of like an
experiment. So in terms of age, we saw that the younger they were, the more
likely they were to complain.
>>: Oh, really?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: And always males tended to complain more than
females. [inaudible] was not as strong as in some of the others, but still it was
kind of very clear that, you know, males were kind of like this is my project, you're
not supposed to take it. And also the younger they were. Yeah.
So one of the things that we also got actually were people suggesting like ways
in which we could address this problem of bad remixing. So one of the kids
actually suggested that we should have like a read-only version of a project,
where people could only see it but they cannot touch it.
We didn't really like this idea because we thought that the whole, you know, idea
about Scratch was that you could actually build on other people's project.
But this other kid actually suggested something, which is what we actually did.
He said something like you should market with the creator's name at the bottom.
So like if I remix Lili's project, it will say, you know, made by Andres but based on
Lili's project. So this is what we actually ended up doing. We got a lot of these
requests. And we kind of did this in a more experimental way.
So again, you know, we have this project, we have the name of the creator, and
then it says based on so and so's project. So we did that. And we looked -- we
tried to see what the effect of that was, you know. My idea was that that will
probably solve all the problems.
But turns out that, you know, we saw the before automatic attribution after
automatic attribution. You know, you can pay attention to the height of this. And
then the differences between before and after were not very significant. Actually
they were not significant at all.
So we saw no change in, you know -- people were not more positive about it.
They were not more, you know, negative or silent. We also -- one of the things
that we can do is that we track when people visit the project, we can see if they
visited and if they said anything. So you saw that -- you see that there is not
really a big difference there between automatic attribution and not automatic
attribution.
So we were puzzled by this. And we were trying to figure out why that
happened. So we started browsing around, you know, the website. And we
found that a lot of the kids were using the project notes as a way to give credit.
Even though there was this automatic attribution, they still felt the need of saying,
you know, I created this based on so and so's project.
And then we were wondering, well, maybe that's actually what makes a big
difference between the positive and the negative. So then we again took the
same sample, and then we looked at again at these projects between the ones
who have credit and the ones without credit, and we actually saw a increase of
positiveness. When there is credit in the notes, then people tend to be more
positive.
In some ways you can interpret this as like people were quiet in some ways but
as soon as you see that somebody is leaving credit in the notes you're like oh,
this person actually took the time to write down my name or whatever, and then
you're like, oh, I'm going to say something positive. Yeah?
>>: [inaudible] directions like one thing that I think some other system had, I
can't remember which one [inaudible], but like sometimes it's nice to be able to
go back to the source material. So somebody -- maybe the woman who is
making the animated characterization, right? And then you could say that like
these are being used in 150 other projects, right, or like there's some discounted
number of hits from those other projects which kind of feeds back to this and you
get like so virtual head count which has to do with all your ->> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right. So that's actually the second intervention
that we did.
>>: You did. Okay.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: [inaudible] [laughter]. So one of the things that
we wanted to -- you know, we saw this in the data. But we wanted to actually get
-- you know, talk to people and see if they actually talk this way or if it was just
some kind of weird thing in the data. So we actually interviewed people.
So let me show you. I asked a bunch of kids, you know, what do you think about
remixing. I showed them on paper these kind of fictional cases of remixing, and I
told them, you know, what do you think about this case and this case?
So first I asked this kid what do you think about remixing -- let me see if I have
some -- well ->>: Did you plug it in?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: No, but [inaudible].
>>: [inaudible].
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yeah. I can put it here.
Give me the definition of remixing.
>>: Taking somebody else's project and then doing ->> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: So let me see.
>>: Taking somebody else's project and then changing a lot of it, and then
sharing it and giving credit.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Well, you can barely hear, but you can read their
-- let me see if I can increase the sound. It's all the way up.
Yeah, so first I asked him to give he a definition of remixing.
Give me a definition of remixing.
>>: Taking somebody else's project and then doing -- and then changing a lot of
it and sharing it and giving credit.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: You can see that the giving credit aspect was an
important aspect for this kid.
>>: They're copies. If green had actually said in the project notes this is a remix
of red's project, full credit goes to him.
>>: Right.
>>: Then I -- then I would consider it a remix. But this is definitely a copy.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: I see.
And this was in response to an example that I showed him where like there was
automatic attribution but there was not manual credit. And he said well, that's
fine, but, you know, he should actually say that.
And then you -- you know, again, one of the things that we thought is like well,
maybe one thing that we could do is, you know, we could appeal to reputation.
And one of the things that we saw -- a lot of the kids were really excited about
being on the front page of the website. So, in fact, there was this kid who
described how you can be popular on Scratch as a way to, you know, give you a
sample of what people feel about being famous.
>>: How to get your projects popular. Step one, take time over your project to
make it a decent project. That way people are more likely going to love your
project. Step two, add lots of people to your list of friends. Then you're more
likely going to have people to love your project. Step three, add your project to a
gallery so then when people are searching through other people's galleries they'll
find your project. Step four, put your project in a popular tag and then more
people are going to find it when they're going through the most popular tags.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: So this is just to show you how people really,
you know, care about being popular. And one of the things that people use for
popularity is they use the front page. So the front page is popular with things
like, you know, feature projects, you know, projects that are top love, top view, so
that, you know, different ways in which projects can get to the front page.
And one of the things that we added was this top remix project. So if my project
gets remixed a lot, then, you know, I could be featured on the front page. So,
you know, that's how the section looks like.
And one of the things that we saw is that people started to create these projects
that are explicitly for remixing. So this created a new genre of projects. So this
is one example is that are like chain remixes. So actually this is because a few
months ago we received this take-down notice by Viacom because there were
some kids who made a Pac Man game, and apparently Pac Man owns -- I mean
Viacom owns Pac Man.
And then they send us a cease and desist letter. We had to take down the
project. And we explained to the kids what happened, and they were really
upset, like oh, why is Viacom doing this. So then these kids kind of used
remixing and this type of chain remixing as a way of, you know, engaging the
community in these kind of expressive form of creation. So you see this is one of
the projects that remixed this first one. And, you know, there are tons of avatars
that people added to the project and they were like running around and doing all
these things.
So that's an example of what happened once we added this top remix category in
the front page. And one of the things that we are studying right now is where -what was the impact in terms of, you know, decreasing complaints and what kind
of anecdotally what we found is it did decrease complaints but also increased the
remixing a lot, and it kind of created this new genre of participation like this chain
remixes.
And one of the things that we have on the website we have visualization under
every project you see there is a remix you can click on the number of remixes
and it shows you this kind of visualization. It's like a little JavaScript widget that
you can then browse through all the remixes that have been generated from one
particular project. So you just see this project by [inaudible] generated all these
other projects, and then these ones generated all these other ones. And then the
chain remixes are more like this, you know, where there is like one adding to the
next one and the next one and the next one.
So it was really interesting to add this visualization and also to see what people
are doing thanks to the visualization these kind of more chain remixes. We've
been logging all the visits to the visualization. And one of the things that I'm
planning to do is to look at what was the effect of the visualization, whether it
made a difference or not.
Because we often see lots of visualization and we are like, oh, nice, and then we
just move on. I want to figure out whether that had an effect or not.
So, you know, kind of wrapping up in terms of the different things that I've been
doing. I've been thinking about ways of structuring or thinking about the -- this
space in a way that kind of makes sense not just for Scratch but also for other
kind of remixing communities.
So I've been thing about the kind of again the structural dimensions of remixing.
And I've been thinking that, you know, these kind of attributes are, you know, the
core of what makes a remixing system work.
So, for example, what I was describing before around attribution and credit is part
of what, you know, one of the important elements that we need to consider when
thinking about remixing systems. The other aspect, you know, of Scratch in
particular is an interesting space because everything that you see there it can be
decomposed in its internal parts. So every single sprite, every single character,
every piece of code, it's an element that can be taken apart and reused.
And so each of these components can be reused. And the size of the
components, there's a lot of work on Wikipedia, for example. The people argue
that the reason why Wikipedia has succeeded is because the granularity of the
contribution is super -- you can even contribute one character, right. You can
add the -- you know, remove a typo or something like that. And that has allowed
lots of people to contribute because you might not feel like writing a whole article,
but you might feel like, you know, fixing a typo hear and there. So granularities
are an important aspect for this kind of social production.
Again, also modularities, kind of like the opposite of decompose [inaudible] how
easy is it to put together pieces that are out there into, you know, something new.
And one of the other things is, you know, around openness, you know, how open
is the system? In the case of Scratch, you know, everything is open. But you
could in a system where maybe you don't allow people to remix other people's
work unless they explicitly say so. So this is a kind of some of the structural
dimensions that I feel like are important to consider.
And then again in terms of the functions that remixing place in the Scratch and
other communities I've been thinking about in these two axis. On the one side is,
you know, what is the size of the group that is involved in the remixing process.
So, you know, I mentioned these groups like Crank, Inc., or Grey Bear
Productions that are kind of like more than two people. There are also pairs like
at the beginning Crank, Inc., was just these two kids working with each other.
And then there are crowds, you know, like crowd remixing like the chains where
there's like tons of people adding to a project. And so we see this in terms of
size and in terms of, you know, the size of how much you borrow from another
person's work will be from taking the whole project, which is actually quite
controversial in Scratch. You know, if you copy somebody else's project and
don't change anything, that's probably not okay. And you can also, you know,
just take a little piece. You know, you can take an image or a sound or a piece of
code, or you could take a sprite, you know, like a whole character.
So I see that the different types of remixing and the roles that remixing plays in
this learning community are around these two dimensions.
And finally one of the things that again I've been looking at is, you know, what are
people's attitudes towards remixing both from the perspective of the originator or
the perspective of the remixer, you know, the person creating the remix.
So from the perspective of the originator, you know, I've seen people from being
really encouraging, you know, inviting other people to remixer work, or people
who are saying, you know, you can remix but you have to follow these certain
rules. And they're like the community has developed certain normative standards
of what's okay and what's not okay to remix.
And there's other people who are like completely against remixing no matter
what. And actually we had some kids who have left the community because they
were not okay with the kind of openness of Scratch. They were like, well, you
know, I don't want people to touch my projects. And we were like, well, this is the
way it is in Scratch. And they were like, well, okay, so I'm going to leave. So
some kids just don't like that.
There is also, you know, in terms of the remixer, you can see that people -sometimes people are extremely, you know, sensitive of other people's work, and
they have to ask for permission, which they don't have to. But they feel like they
need to ask for permission.
Or sometimes they know the norms and they know, you know, when you ask for
permission and when you don't. And there is other kids who actually engage in
remixing as a form of strolling. So they're like, you know, I'm going to remix your
project making fun of you or I'm going to remix just as a way to annoy you by not
changing anything. So we see this kind of range of remixing happening in
Scratch.
So it just to end, let me see, you know, one of the key things that I've been
thinking about is, you know, what is the next Wikipedia in some ways. So we've
seen, you know, lots of different projects in the open source community.
Wikipedia. But what is it that, you know, comes next?
And I see Scratch and other systems like this, you know, engaging amateur,
empowering amateurs as kind of one of these ways in which one could think of,
you know, opening social creativity for everyone. And, you know, not only
allowing people to read, which is what, you know, television does or like receive
content, and not only allowing people to write and publish their work but also
engage people in remixing and working with other people.
So this is kind of where I'm at. And I feel like this is -- it points in the direction on
which I feel systems shall move forward and that it really involves, you know,
both the design of these systems as well as the understanding of the cultural and
social norms of the systems. So the way I see my work is not only as a designer
or not only as a kind of researcher, but I see design as a way of understanding.
And I think this is kind of the way a lot of the research around this area could
move forward in the future.
And so with that, I'll leave it for questions. Yes. Thank you.
[applause].
>>: With the remixes, now, I'm assuming that most of the remixes were this
changing the content, the sprites, the graphics, the color versus changing the
code. Do you have any like, you know, statistical number about what the
balance was there?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yeah. I haven't done it lately, but the last time I
did it was like maybe 70 percent of projects were changing just aesthetics and,
you know, 30 percent were changing pieces of like code actually.
And one of the things that I was surprised about is that people seem to be more
sensitive about the change of aesthetics than the change of code. So in some
ways one of the things that I've been thinking about is that maybe there are like
two modes of working with other people, like the engineer mode in some ways,
where it's like, you know, people are more willing to share their code because
they feel like their ideas in some ways and they're less protective of their work.
And I feel that a lot of the kids who are more in the artist kind of side, they're
super protective of their creations maybe because they see these like I finish this
thing and it's done and it's like untouchable in some ways. And one of the
intentions that we had was with artists more so than with game makers, which
are more like programmes. Yes?
>>: I was going to say I really like this work, I've been a fan of Scratch for a long
time, but I think that, you know, the attribution aspect is really important.
So what I was going to say that I think that -- I think it's quite different from
Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is a case where people are really trying to -- I mean,
they kind of -- people's attitudes -- and there have been some studies on this,
and I hope people are looking at it more as a means of kind of helping gestalt of,
you know, overall information, basic numbers. This is really about creativity and
your own creation.
But Wikipedia in a sense like no original content, like it all has to be like
[inaudible] this is really about people who make their own things.
The thing I was going to say from my own experience from doing art steps I think
that -- so I think the thing you said about the aesthetic work versus the
programming the very interesting way, I think what you said is exactly right, and
especially when you start out, you know, it's kind of like, well, I've made
something that's done, you know, and you have this attitude that, like, I did the
whole thing and it's done. Why are you messing with my thing? It's done. And I
want to be famous for doing the whole thing.
And then as time goes on and you realize, like, well, lots of other people are
good at lots of other things and it's okay for my thing to be a component, you
know, of what other people are doing with changes, and I just wonder if there is
anything that you can do from the [inaudible] I had always hoped that the
attribution aspect would actually help a lot with this, that people would still feel
empowered knowing that, you know, if they helped a lot of people. But I wonder
if maybe part of this is an education thing to kind of like, you know, to help people
understand that, oh, it doesn't make your project worse when someone else
takes it somehow, you know.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right. I know this is part of the culture of the
community in some ways and, you know, who knows, a lot of the kids are in the
schools where, you know, schools are all about, you know, you have to do your
own work, and it's all very individualistic.
But one of the systems that I find really fascinating, actually I've been doing some
research on this is I call Fortune. Probably some of you know. You probably
[inaudible] I just read a Wikipedia article about it.
But one of the interesting things of Fortune is there is a lot of creative work, and
all of this happens without user name. So the site is completely anonymous.
There's no user names at all. And there's a lot of people who spend, you know,
fair amount of time, you know, putting together this image of a cat with some
captions or some funny things. And you see this site. So what we've been
doing, we've been screen scraping the site, trying to see how these emerge and
so on.
And one of the things that we see is that there is -- the majority of content there is
published anonymously. And it's really, really fast. So a thread on Fortune lasts,
you know, an average five minutes and on the front page only 20 seconds. It's
like really, really fast.
And what we see is that a lot of these iterations are people just putting like some
idea, some drawing, some kind of piece of art in some ways, and then letting
other people remix it and, you know, in their own ways. And you see these kind
of means emerge really, really fast and people started engaging in this form of
production that is very different from deviantART or YouTube, where it's like the
user name, the profit base and other things.
And I feel like people in this community, they get it. They know that, you know,
you put something there and maybe you're not even proud of it and you just don't
want your name associated to it. And I wonder if there are things that we could
do around that that, you know, that cannot be -- all be like Fortune, but they can
be, you know, open and anonymous in some ways but within a community of
people that know and trust each other.
And when I was looking to this professor, actually, she was saying how -- she's
the head of the department. And she said how she feels like she often goes to
her colleagues and her colleagues don't give her like good feedback because
they're afraid that she might, you know, do something to them. And she says I
wish there was a system where I could write something and people could
anonymously give comments to my work because I don't want my name, you
know, to be kind of a powerful force of like maybe people feel kind of scared.
And I feel like there is somewhere in between where, you know, Scratch is very
much like YouTube or, you know, all these website where there's a user name, a
profile page. But there might be another way in which people might be interested
in engaging and participating, and that doesn't have to be associated with names
and doesn't feel like you have to finish something and share it, it can be a draft or
->>: Yeah, I think the expectations would change a lot if it was anonymous. But I
think also built up a little bit of effort [inaudible] people would put in their projects
[inaudible] it doesn't take a whole lot of effort. It's like if someone is like, oh, you
know, I spent a month making this awesome walking character, and they're like,
that's my character. And they probably wouldn't want to put it up anonymously
because they feel like I put a lot of work into this.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yeah. Definitely. And that's one of the things
that I'm still trying to figure out whether the nature of the product also matches
the nature of the social environment. And I think it might, right? So like maybe
like, for example, for Wikipedia it's great that, you know -- it almost feels like
people don't really care about attribution, right, so they probably write something
there like yeah, whatever.
But if you look at YouTube or, you know, other sites people do. And then the
qualitative nature of this, the content generated there is different. So maybe it is,
you know, something that we cannot change. And, you know, if you want to
make pieces of art, you need this attribution and this artist who is like, you know,
super famous, if you want something fast and remixable, you might need to you
know, do something different, you know. Yeah, uh-huh?
>>: Did you look at the idea of like [inaudible] opt out of having certain content
remixed or something like that? Like I've created this but I want to tag it as not.
But maybe you have to earn that. Like you have to do so many things that can
be remixed and people use to earn some credit so you can say I want to pay to
have this one not ->> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right. Yeah. We haven't done that and
probably because, you know, my idea with Scratch was it is open and we're
going to keep this open sharing. But as an experiment, it would be really cool to
see, you know, how people will change [inaudible].
>>: It would be kind of interesting if -- to figure out whether people would
discover that they didn't get as much traffic as a result of not a lot of Wikipedia
remixed and maybe, you know, the value is in remixing.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right. That's a good point. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Definitely.
>>: Have you -- have you [inaudible] Wikipedia there's kind of this grand
challenge, which is making encyclopedia [inaudible].
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right.
>>: I mean, have you thought of putting in challenges like a game which would
require like collaboration?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yeah. In fact, a few months ago we did this
call-up challenge. The idea is that we put these kind of rules and you had to be
at least two people. And we invited people to join this challenge. And we -- we
saw really interesting work coming out of it. The challenge was -- maybe the
challenge was not great because it was not like a grand challenge, it was more
like you have to use the following spreads and you have to do it in a group. And
then we are going to pick the best projects.
So the -- what happened is that some kids were lying and they were like oh,
yeah, I'm with my friend Suzi or whatever, and you can see the IPs the same,
you know, that account was like probably the same person.
But all the kids engaged in this like really interesting -- so especially the kids who
have already become really famous in the community. They were like, okay, I'm
going to do a group. And, you know, [inaudible] is one of these kids who is older
and who is really technically savvy. He said I'm going to create the group.
Anyone who wants to join, you know, apply here.
And he had like very strict rules in what the project was going to be, how it was
going to happen. And that group actually developed the most interesting of all
the call-up games that people made. And in part was this kind of benevolent
dictator model where he's like I know what to do, and people trust me, I'm
famous in the community, and people, you know, follow me.
So we've seen that happening as well. And in that case, you know, people didn't
care that much that he was getting the credit because they wanted to be
associated with him. So they were like, oh, it's great that I'm working with this
famous guy, even if my name is not like shown highly visible in the website.
So you see a lot of these kind of more social techniques that you [inaudible] to
empower people to collaborate.
>>: And then we talked earlier but, you know, one of the things that you talked
about that was kind of interesting you just kind of opened it up for discussion is
you said that there were some things that these -- like maybe you could talk
about some of the kinds of things that you would be interested in working on, you
know, kind of given this is --
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right. I wanted to show an example kind of
related to that. So there was this kid who made this project, and this is really
simple from the Scratch perspective. It's basically a reflex tester. And the idea
was that you will, you know, click start and then you will, you know, change the
color of the screen to yellow. And when you -- when that happens, you have to
click stop really quickly. And that was kind of like what it was. And then you had
to do it five times. And at the end it gives you a number.
And what this kid was doing was for a science fair project is that he was asking
people to do that and leave in the project notes underneath the project the
number that you did and whether or not you play sports and what kind of sports
you did.
So he was kind of hacking in some ways the social system of Scratch to collect
data from kids. And at the end he had like thousands of comments, actually -- I
don't know if it's here. You can see there's like 1500 views. And all of these
people left the common -- you know, the five seconds I play, you know,
basketball, whatever. And then he collected all this data, and he created another
project where he had this kind of correlation whether there was, you know, some
relationship between playing sports and being fast at, you know, video games.
And to me that was a great example of the kind of things that are not in the
Scratch nor any other system that I've seen, where it's not only about thinking
about computation in the sense of like, oh, I'm going to make a game or this kind
of complicated algorithm, but it's also spaced where you can leverage the power
of crowds in some ways, where you can use these computational skills of
building something like this and gather either funny or interesting data or, you
know, any kind of thing, in this case was just numbers, but you could [inaudible]
opening it up for like maybe like video or maybe sound.
So I feel like the next generations of tools that allow people to build stuff are stuff
that are kind of building on the social aspects of these technologies. So in one of
the things that we see a lot in like Facebook, for example, or Twitter, people
often, you know, are like asking questions to their friends. And it's all text. It's
only text. There is not really much on, you know, more complicated type of
media. And there's also not much you could do to change the system of, you
know, Facebook or Twitter. It's like -- it's what it is and you have to use it.
And I feel like the ability to let people build their own social computing systems
on top of, you know, systems that already exist and using somebody's kind of
basic computational power is something that I think we will see more or we shall
see more in the future because it really opens up, you know, creative work and,
you know, the power of the greed or, you know, cloud computing, whatever you
want to call it to everyone.
Right now it's, you know, we are waiting for whatever some developer is going to
do for us. And this idea of like really opening it up for everyone I think should be
the next step. Yeah?
>> Lili Cheng: Anybody else have questions? Tom or Paul or Chris? Will?
[Inaudible] Anybody else?
>>: I've got to save mine for later.
>>: Yeah. [laughter].
>> Lili Cheng: Okay. Shelly, did you have any?
>>: Well, it was -- maybe this is kind of related to what you were just talking
about, but, you know, thinking more generally about the sort of remixing idea,
where do you see it going in the next five years?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Around remixing?
>>: What's that?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: About remixing in particular or ->>: Well, yeah, remixing and online collaboration.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right. So the way I see things is that I'm
interested in -- personally I'm building systems that help us understand how
people work and also, you know, empower people. So, you know, that's kind of
the space where I'm interested in, and remixing is one of these phenomena.
There is other phenomena that are also really interesting and really powerful. So
one of the things that we see actually around Scratch is that we have this
discussion forum which originally was designed just to ask questions about, you
know, technical things, you know, I'm stuck with this and whatever. And it shows
how that people started to use it, you know, to chat and talk to each other and,
you know, doing this kind of more social stuff, which was okay.
But after a while, people started developing games on the forums where it's like
people decided to kind of like role playing games using the text forums as a way
to engage other people. Like they saw Scratch it's like oh, that's great, but I also
want to make these stories in collaboration with other people.
So we see a lot of kid writing like this game is about, you know, princess that is in
a castle, and now you're allowed to create your own character. And then this
other person comes in and leaves a comment saying, oh, okay I'm the horse or
whatever. And they start building this story collaboratively.
And there are like tons and tons of pages of these stories. And what is
interesting is like this grew so much that it was kind of bothering other people
who were not participating in it because people were like trying to ask how do I
do a loop or whatever.
And so what we did, rather than closing it down, I created this separate Website
with just about text based games. And it has flourished like crazy. It's been like
one of the most active spaces on the Scratch community. And it has little to do
with Scratch, and it has more to do with building things with other people using
just text.
And I see that as one example of the kind of tools that -- one of the -- the
interesting things that people are not only using the text but also now they are
using like hyperlinks as a way to do this kind of like build your own story kind of
thing where it's like click here if you want to choose to be a princess. Click here if
you want to be a prince or whatever.
And then you can click there and text it to another, you know, thread in the
forums. They're kind of hacking this because it's really ugly and it's not really
nice and they embed videos and they do things. And I see these, you know, as a
designer and I see, well, maybe it will be great if we could, you know, build some
tools around these existing practices and really empower people to kind of do
this kind of work. So that's kind of around remixing in some ways, but also kind
of extending it to, you know, collaborative work around creating stories or games.
>>: Can you show us that?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yeah. It's actually really simple. If you'll see -you'll be like ah. I don't have WiFi?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Okay. Well, if you go to TBG forums Scratch
TBG forums, you'll find lots of stories. There are like thousands of stories.
>>: That's awesome.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yes?
>>: I have a question. So I was wondering about how this might work in adult
communities versus with kids and how their expectations and interests might be
different. Like I've seen in recent years like some of the maker communities like
especially stuff around like hardware hacking or [inaudible] and stuff like that
have grown but their interests seem to be very different from Scratch. Like
they're kind of like I'm going to help show you how to make X or, you know,
here's the kind of finished kit to do that.
There was not as much kind of like cooperative -- at least from what I've seen.
And I wonder if, you know, the expectations for adults are -- if you have my
thoughts about like what would remixing look like for the, you know, kind of more
adult community?
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right. I actually think that there is they're not
much different -- I mean, they're not as [inaudible] project very similar, but I think
the main difference is that adults tend to I think understand better perhaps the
perspective of other people and that might help to, you know, create different
kinds of environment.
So one example that comes to mind is Matlab, this program language. They run
this contest where basically the idea there is to -- they put a challenge basically,
a problem, and then they have a particular set of inputs that your program in
Matlab is going to receive. And then you're supposed to submit your code, and if
it performs high you're going to be the winner.
So they actually did this comparison of like opening it up a bit like kind of anyone
can submit the code and anyone can see the code of anyone else and remix it or
make it close so that, you know, people submit their code and then at the end
they tell you whether you won or not.
And what they found is that, you know, a lot of adults kind of like in Scratch, they
were like, oh, I will never participate in a system where anyone can copy my
code and just make a little, you know, semicolon change or whatever and then,
you know, they win. But the ones who actually decided to stay, they found this
really interesting and really worthwhile experience.
And one of the fascinating things about it is that, you know, there was a lot of
people who were like submitting their code and they saw, you know, they perform
well and then somebody else went and saw the website and they were like okay,
I'm going to grab the highest performing code, make a little change, and then,
you know, I'm the winner now. So they kind of fast -- they iterate really fast.
But one of the really interesting things about it is that oftentimes the winner came
from an unexpected entry. So like there was this -- there were these entrants
that were like increasing kind of incrementally the speed and then there was this
one that was really, really slow but actually was really interesting approach to the
problem. And then somebody will find it and they're like, oh, that's actually an
interesting approach, it's just that this person doesn't know if this optimization
method's in Matlab. So then all of a sudden that one that was the show one
became the fastest one. And then, you know, it could be the one that wins.
So to me that shows an example of where, you know, design collectively provide
a space for -- you know, people may be valuing different forms of participation
and different kind of ideas. And in that case, you know, it really benefitted from
giving access to people who might not even win, but they were interested to see,
you know, I have this idea, maybe won't work, I'm not an expert in Matlab, maybe
somebody else could take it and do it.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yeah, he does [inaudible].
>>: He [inaudible] for Matlab. He gives an awesome talk on -- there's kind of this
really interesting relationship in Matlab contest between collaboration and
competition. Right? Because he said you just want to balance. Because it is a
contest with an end date and there's a winner. But, you know, the idea is to build
on each other. And they actually track incremental differences versus all the
branches you can see it. It's super cool.
>>: That's interesting. Do they do the attribution thing as well, like were you able
to see all the component people who were involved?
>>: Yeah, you can see that, yeah.
>>: Yeah.
>>: You can.
[brief talking over].
>>: Just another community is like so when -- I can't remember what it's called
again. There's been several kind of music startups, you know, where you can do
these remixes and they do attribution of some kind so you can see the stuff. But
they have all failed. And like Dan Morris and I have looked at a bunch of these
and we're like, oh, the idea is so good but why does it always fail? And it's like -and you've never seen people like kind of it's like okay, well, even the best
people aren't getting on this or the people who are there aren't putting their A
game, you know, into the tracks that they actually upload and stuff like that. And
you get this -- it's I don't know maybe it's because musicians are just more
inherently think everyone's stealing from them all the time.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Right. But I think this is a space where -- that
there is, you know, when we show Scratch to like programmers sometimes
they're like oh, that's not really code that's just like kids playing, you know, these
blogs, code is never gong to be like that. And maybe it's true, you know, code
might never be like Scratch.
But one of the things that we see is that you are really opening new -- you know,
you are opening this space to new people. So maybe the professional musicians
will never engage in these projects, but maybe, you know, there are people who
are amateurs and exploring and they're like, well, I don't have anything to lose,
you know, I've just learning. And I think that You Tube is an example of that.
You know, you don't see, you know, super famous people sharing their movies
there.
Although now, you know, even the president shares things there. But it had to be
validated by millions of people saying, you know, I want to share a silly picture of
my cat or a video of my cat doing something funny. And once you have like, you
know, 50 million videos of that, you are like well, there is a lot of people there.
And, you know, it becomes validated in some ways.
So maybe that's what needs to happen with the systems, you know.
>>: [inaudible] remember how you said even with the kids you'd see like much
more willingness to share for code or have remixing for code versus aesthetic
content.
>>: Yeah.
>>: You've got movies -- movies that validate that.
>>: But the movies, are they being remixed, though, or are they just like, you
know ->>: [inaudible] make original content on YouTube.
>>: But there have been cases of like -- like I can't remember which one now,
but you know those Auto-Tune the News guys [inaudible]. But like some of the
people who have been auto tuned and get really pissed, you know. And other
people are like that was great, you know. So they're still like, you know -- I don't
know.
>>: It seems like jQuery is almost exactly like [inaudible] library has gotten
pushed down and then you keep attribution in the comments per license I guess.
>>: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>>: It doesn't seem like code has to be not like this. Certainly it's harder and in a
software environment but ->>: I think even personally like I'm like oh, throw my code out so other people
can use it and remix like that's fine but I'm like throw my music out and let other
people like reuse [inaudible].
>>: Are you a professional musician or ->>: No, I'm not, thank God. But I'm like, you know, I'm an amateur and it's ->>: [inaudible] you feel that way about music even though you're an amateur
and you [inaudible].
>>: [inaudible] a professional.
>>: That's true.
>>: [inaudible].
>>: Yeah. It's different. It's somehow like it's -- I have to think about it more, but
I think it is something to do with like, you know, like well, this was my expression
and I was trying to -- I actually had a case where like I had a song that I had done
and I put it out on YouTube. And I just had a jam with this one guy one
afternoon.
Without telling me he went and redid a complete version of this song, did a studio
version, put it on an album. And like a day before he releases the album, he's
like, oh, so by the way I did this. What do you think? And I was like well, I'm not
sure I like this. And he's like, well, it's kind of too late because it's going to be on
my album. And I was like -- I was really pissed. Like, you know, on the one hand
I'm like, well, it's flattering that someone would take my song and like, you know,
put $3,000 in a studio to make it into full operation. But on the other hand I was
just like, but that's my song.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: But was it more like you felt like your work was
being used in a way that shouldn't be used or was it about the attribution
on [inaudible] he was not giving you enough credit?
>>: He was kind of a jerk. So he didn't have -- well, he did me attribution
eventually. But like -- I think it was more of the former that bugged me more.
Because I was like, you know, I wrote this -- I wrote this thing with a particular
mood and a particular kind of thought and composition, and he did this hard rock
version of the song. You know, it's like well, it's kind of interesting, but that's not
what I meant and it was kind of -- it felt weird.
>>: Yeah.
>>: [inaudible] my code, like I've had lots of people ->>: Now we know how to torture Sumit [laughter]. Take his music and make a
really bad version.
>>: [inaudible] wonder if code comes from a different place though. Like you
want to share this [inaudible].
>>: Yeah.
>>: Sit down and rewrite something because he needs it to achieve this goal.
And you're like boy if this could save a bunch of people time.
>>: Yeah, totally.
>>: Music isn't quite that. You're expressing something as opposed to code
you're achieving.
>>: Yeah.
>>: Yeah, it seems like a [inaudible] feel like a technical skill, but you're remixing
because you need to learn how to achieve this skill versus personal expression.
Like this is actually an expression of me in my personality or my creative effort
but, you know -- and I'm -- I'm happy to give you everything you need to know to
use my methods but not necessarily to produce the same personal expression.
>>: Exactly. I would be happy to teach like if I had -- like if I had the best like,
you know, guitar learning technique that I've like, you know, figured out the
system, I would be like I would be happy to like, you know, give it to somebody
else and show them how to do it. But then [inaudible] yeah.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Yeah. One of the cases that we saw in Scratch,
kind of like that was this girl that made a character called Macky-tacky [phonetic].
That was her user name as well. There was like a little [inaudible], you know,
that walks around. And she made it in a way so that -- I don't know if it was on
purpose or not, but basically the character was simple enough but also really
kind of cute and that other kids will start to make their own tackys, they call them
tackys so you could create, you know, Lili-tacky or something like that. And then
they will make this really cool, you know, their own versions of this lizard. And
she basically got this whole world of Macky-tacks, and they had their own names.
They were like, oh, yeah, we're all tackys. They kind of became a group this
way.
And she really embraced that. And she kind of became the spokesperson almost
of this group. And at the beginning I was surprised because I was like, you
know, this is probably a character that this name may or something because it
seemed kind of like Disney like. And I was like, you know, probably something
that they copy from somewhere else.
But it turns out that she actually made it. And I was even more surprised
because her father contact us and he said, you know, it's great that my girl is like
-- she's sharing this work and whatever, but now it turns out that some kids are
making T-shirts with the character and they're selling them. And they are like can
you stop them?
Well, first of all, we cannot because, you know, it's all happening in [inaudible] or
one of those other websites. And secondly it's like I think it's great but, you
know, what can you do? And the girl actually really liked it. She was really
excited that people were making T-shirts with that.
>>: [inaudible] I mean I think that's maybe more what I feel about the music thing
because I feel like it's not so much they wouldn't ever want to have someone else
reuse it, but I would want them to use it in kind. Like I would want them to have
like okay like, you know, this is a -- you know, this is like a background I would
kind of use for this kind of film. And if someone is like oh, I've got a film like that
that I would love to use as a background music, that's great, like I'm really happy
to see that. And someone else is like well, they used it in a feature film
[inaudible] that's fine, that's really cool.
But like if someone is like no, I'm going to use this and like put it in a horror film
or something like that, I'm like no, no, that's.
>>: This example reminded me of these two adults doing this. So I don't know if
you've seen this. This is an artist. His name is Richard Prince. And he basically
-- what he does is he takes pictures of Marlboro ads and he blows them up like
really, really big. Like he's a photographer. So he just takes pictures of
photographs and then exhibits them on, you know, in this case the Guggenheim
Museum. And he actually gets paid like three million dollars for this photograph.
And it's just a photo.
>>: [inaudible] cigarette [inaudible].
>>: [inaudible].
>>: It's a photo of a photo.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: It's a photo of a photo. And it's a photo of an ad.
And what happened is the guy who took the first photo for Marlboro was paid by
Marlboro. He became really upset and he sued him. And he said I don't want
money I just want credit because this guy is taking pictures of my work and he's
getting five million dollars for a photo.
>>: That's nuts.
[brief talking over].
>>: [Inaudible] is it a political commentary on Marlboro.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Something like that. Recently I saw this guy
took pictures of -- so there was this book of Rastafari people in Jamaica. And he
took pictures of the pictures and he added some funny like messages or
whatever to some of the people. And then he exhibited these photos again in
like a museum like Guggenheim. And they got sued and they actually lost.
And it was one of the first cases where fair use is lost in a way that artists felt that
they were not supporting this guy because they thought this guy was, you know,
like a leech in some ways, like he was capitalizing on the work of other people.
And one of the things that the judge asked him is what are you contributing?
One of the rules of fair use is you have to make a transformation. And he's like
no, I -- he didn't have an answer for that.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Lili Cheng: All right, you guys. Well, thank you.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Thanks a lot for coming.
>>: Thank you.
[applause]