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This essay investigates the figure of the author and the concept of authorship in audio mashups and remixing. The analysis traces the development and functional aspects of this particular authority figure, entertains the recent crisis in authorship that has led to claims of the “death of the author,” and investigates the way both aspects shape our understanding of and responses to the mashup. The objective of the investigation is not to provide an authoritative account that will decide things once and for all. Instead, it concludes with a more sophisticated understanding of how the question concerning authorship needs to be situated and deployed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dominant metaphor used to describe and situate MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role playing games (e.g. Ultima Online, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc.), has been "new world" and "new frontier." By deploying this powerful imagery, game developers, players, the popular media, and academic researchers draw explicit connections between the technology of MMORPGs and the European encounter with the Americas and the western expansion of the United States. Although providing a compelling and often recognizable explanation of the innovations and opportunities of this new technology, the use of this terminology comes with a considerable price, one that had been demonstrated and examined by scholars of the Internet, cyberspace, and virtual reality over a decade ago. This essay explores the impact and significance of the terms "new world" and "frontier" as they have been deployed to explain and describe MMORPGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical evaluations of audio mash-ups and remixes tend to congregate around two poles. On the one hand, these often clever re-combinations of recorded music are celebrated as innovative and creative interventions in the material of bland commodity culture. On the other hand, they are often reviled as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal because they do nothing more than appropriate and reconfigure the intellectual property of others. This essay does not side with either position but identifies and critiques the common understanding and fundamental assumptions that make these two, opposed positions possible in the first place. The investigation of this matter is divided into two main parts. The first considers the traditional understanding of technologically enabled reproduction and the often unquestioned value it invests in the concept of originality. It does so by beginning with a somewhat unlikely source, Plato's Phaedrus—a dialogue that, it is argued, articulates the original concept of originality that both determines and is reproduced in the theories and practices of sound recording. The second part of the essay demonstrates how the audio mash-up deliberately intervenes in this tradition, advancing a fundamental challenge to the original understanding and privilege of originality. In making this argument, however, the essay does not endeavor to position the mash-up as anything unique or innovative. Instead, it demonstrates how mash-ups, true to their thoroughly derivative nature, plunder, reuse, and remix anomalies that are already available in and constitutive of recorded music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]