Nine new short stories licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike licences have arrived from authors around the country. It’s now up to you to remix these stories, making sure to acknowledge the author, that your remix is not for commercial use, and your new work is available for others to remix.

Email your remixes to anthology@creativecommons.org.au before 31 August to have your story posted on the website and for the chance to be published in the hard copy anthology alongside your favourite author.

Want to know more about remixing literature? Join us at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival for Beyond Read/Write: A Literature Remix Masterclass with RML Project Leader, Amy Barker and Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia: Friday 29 August 2008 from 9.00am - 11.00pm at the Immigration Museum. It’s a free event but places are limited so book now by phoning 1300 722 211. Then bring your laptop or mobile phone and be part of a live multimedia remix event at Federation Square, Saturday 30th August 2008 from 3.30-5.00pm.

A sometime DJ, Sean has remixed Kim Wilkins’s short story Dreamless. All the lines are lifted intact from the original story, apart from a couple of tiny tense tweaks to create a villanelle: a short poem of written in tercets (usually five) followed by a final quatrain, all being based on two rhyme.

Sean is the author of over sixty published short stories and twenty-five novels, he has been nominated for the Ditmar, the Aurealis and the prestigious Philip K Dick Award and his work has been published around the world in numerous languages, on-line, and in spoken word editions.

Read Sean’s Super-Villanelle Dub Mix and alternate remix and tell us what you think!

Cate is highly regarded as a short story writer, and has many major prizes to her credit including winning The Age Short Story Competition (twice!), the HQ-Sceptre Short Story Award, and the University of Canberra Short Story Prize. Her stories have been widely anthologised in Australia and Cold Snap appeared in The New Yorker magazine.

Cate has described her new remixable work Renovator’s Heaven as ”a sort of speculative, open-ended, little bit supernatural little bit horror short story”.

To read more of Cate’s short stories get yourself a copy of her wonderful collection Dark Roots.

A university essay on East-Asian cinema, Text: Transcendental Style and the Poetics of Tsai Ming-liang
by Tim Dodds, has been transformed into a poetic response, Text: the moment of absurd transcendental mundanity by Don Cameron, which uses only (but not all!) words from the original essay. Very clever!

Check out the ABC Pool website (beta version) where you can download and remix feely using Creative Commons licenses. It’s a place “to share your creative content with friends and the world — music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations, and more.”

It’s a longer story than Emily’s but don’t be scared off by the word count. It’s written in two parts with an interesting time lapse inbetween so there’s lots of room for playing with structure. Think flashbacks!

Or try putting the whole story through one of the online cut up machines we blogged about. We used the lazarus corporation’s Text Mixing Desk to come up with our own rastafarian prude remix using the “rasta rack” module combined with the “expletive deleted” filter.

Damian is the author of the excellent novel Luck in the Greater West, which won him the ABC Fiction Award. As one of the judges commented, “Luck in the Greater West offers a compelling insight into a world Australian literature doesn’t often visit.”

You can get yourself a copy of Damian’s novel here or do as his latest character Dara would and track him down on MySpace.

The only technology required to do an old school cut up is a sharp pair of scissors. You take a complete and fully linear text, commonly a newspaper or magazine article, and cut it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged to create a new text. Beatnik William S. Burroughs is one of the most famous proponents of the cut-up technique, which was subsequently used by musicians such as David Bowie as a method of composing new lyrics.

“Fold-in” is the technique of taking two different sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), cutting each sheet in half and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page. Sounds like a literary mash up?

For an example of a completely random remix performed using the Cut ‘n’ Mix word machine’s ‘Morpher’ output effect, which tweaks the meanings of words by replacing with synonyms click here. To try your own automated remixes check out:

Cutup Engine Input/paste text or URL’s which are then cut up/together.

Lazarus Corporation Text Mixing Desk is online software that manipulates text using the cut-up technique.

Open Wound 1.0 is a language mixing tool developed in the same spirt as a DJ’s set of turntables, utilising grammatical parts of speech.

Cut ‘n’ Mix 4.0 4-track text cut up and mixing software.

Grazulis’ Cut-Up Machine is a burroughsian cut up machine (choose specified or random increments of words to cut, rub out words).

Language Is A Virus Cut-Up Machine, Slice-n-Dice, Cut-Up techniques explained.

By far and away the question we most often hear is “what are the rules for remixing literature?”. Well there are “rules” (ie terms) set out by the Creative Commons licence but beyond this, RML isn’t going to give you any rules. What we will do is suggest some things to think about.

When it comes to changing up a story the most obvious ways are transforming elements like point of view, structure, dialogue, characters, even genre. But there are other ways to think about remixing. For instance, the writer Jeff Noon talks about concepts - comparable to computerised music effects - that work as “imaginary technologies, designed to fire the writer’s imagination”. Noon works with “filter gates” such as Randomise, Decay, Explode, Ehance, Control and he even “drugs” the language.

Experiment. Think up different ways in which the stories and the language can be transformed to make it your own. In the words of Jeff Noon, “It’s fun, and more than a little scary sometimes, especially when a piece dissolves down into pure nonesense. But it can always be rescued and, eventually, some phrase or image will emerge from the process, some clue as to how the overall piece will end, and the work can now be pushed along in this direction.”

That’s enough from us. We want to hear what you think about the process of lit remix. Leave a comment or send an email to anthology@creativecommons.org.au.

To make things easy this is a very very short story, a work of flash fiction by Emily Maguire, titled Cherished.

Emily is an acclaimed novelist, essayist and journalist. Her latest book is Princesses and Pornstars: Sex + Power + Identity. Her novels are Taming the Beast and The Gospel According to Luke.

So get cutting, pasting, tweaking, twisting, shuffling, adding and then republish your work on the site for others to remix.

Just email your remix to anthology@creativecommons.org.au.

Bring your laptop or mobile phone on Saturday 30 August from 3 - 4:30pm and be part of a live multimedia remix event where you can freely remix brand new stories by our authors.

View the works here in advance or simply come along on the day where you’ll find stories scattered about the Square. Re-imagine and remix them and then send your remixed short story or flash fiction to the SMS TV system on the big screen at Federation Square, post them to our website, and have your remixed texts incorporated in a live A/V set by .M.

You can remix to your heart’s content as long as the original author is acknowledged, the remix is not for commercial use and the new work is available for others to remix.

All works created and posted to our site during the event will be automatically considered for publication in the anthology.

When the functionality of the internet lets content be copied as easily as that, it is hard to maintain the traditional “all rights reserved”/can’t touch this rhetoric of copyright. Sure, at law it’s a breach of copyright. But that doesn’t stop copying. There are a lot of internet users who don’t even realise that the copies they make are illegal. Copyright is dead.

Stop. Remix that. Copyright isn’t dead, it’s being (re)born. To the copyright traditionalists I say stop trying to stop copying, because you won’t. Start looking at regulating how people can copy. There is a mass of benefits to be gained by letting people have access to your content. The trick is knowing how to identify what bits to give away and what bits to keep. “But how?” you’re thinking, “I don’t know anything about copyright and I can’t afford a lawyer.” No problems, think Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is remixing copyright into a voluntary “some rights reserved” system. At the core of the Creative Commons project is a suite of standardised licences that are made freely available to authors and artists and which provide a range of protections and freedoms for their material. For CC it’s about options. Want to be recognised as the author of your blog? Then require Attribution. Don’t want others making money from your animation? Easy. Put the work under a Non-Commercial term. Just want people to pass your novella around but don’t want them changing it? A No Derivatives licence will do that. And what if you want to see what people will do mashing up your work, but think they should share too? No problems, Share Alike compels them to let others remix anything they’ve made from your work.

But why stop there? Want to be acknowledged as the creator of your podcast and allow people to use it for non-commercial purposes? Put it under an Attribution-Non-Commercial licence and you’ve done just that. Using the CC licence generator on creativecommons.org, a mix and match of the permissions is as easy as answering a few questions.

At Creative Commons we don’t want to get rid of copyright, we want to remix it.

Still not sure what it is all about? We’ve got a couple of explanatory videos here and more detailed overview of Creative Commons here.