An interesting tale of remix culture in China of all places:

A spoof hits China’s Web – and a star is born

The article is about a fan-made remixing and mashup of the Chinese movie “The Promise”, which apparently is the most expensive movie ever made in China also apparently pretty bad. The remix on the other hand is reportedly pretty funny. The article suggests that there isn’t much tradition of parody or remixing in China, and as such the public debate is working it’s way through the basic premises of the intellectual property skirmish from the ground up.

It’s interesting that the the Christian Science Monitor article focuses on that lack of remixing tradition in China. Outside of a fairly fringe subculture, it’s not like there’s much of a mainstream remixing culture in Canada, the US, or Europe that I’m aware of. In fact, I would guess that if someone in Canada released an extensivley remixed version of King Kong it either wouldn’t get much interest, or if it did people would be pretty quick to abandon the remixer to his legal fate at the hands of the movie studios on the grounds that “she must have known it was coming”. As reported here, the discussion in China seems to be more quickly grasping the idea that a significantly reworked work of art is a new work even if it collages old art in the process. Faster than we seem to be getting that point in the west. Maybe that’s because in China they don’t have a massively entrenched series of art “industries” desperately trying to corral artworks into convenient non-overlapping entities.