Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

As a child of the seventies who grew up alongside the original Star Wars trilogy (I was seven when the first one came out, and just getting into girls when the last one finally appeared six years later), George Lucas’s space epic has always held a dear place in my heart, second only perhaps to Atari. And Star Wars, while not only immensely popular in terms of revenue, was immensely inspirational as well, with devoted fans over the years dressing up as their favorite characters for conventions or Halloween, or else drawing scenes from the movie in hours of wasted art classes. But now, in this new digital age, fans not only pay homage to the Star Wars universe (i.e. Chad Vader), but they can actually interact with it (for instance, the version of The Phantom Menace in which a fan erased Jar Jar Binks). However, these have always been illegal enterprises which, more often than not, have led to either lawsuits or pressure from Lucas to remove them from circulation. But now, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Lucasfilm plans to make clips of Star Wars available to fans on the Internet to mash up — meaning to remix however they want — at will.”

The 250 clips will be taken from all six Star Wars movies, and will be paired with an editing program that will allow fans the ability to “cut, add to and retool the clips. Then they can post their creations to blogs or social-networking sites like MySpace. More clips will come out from time to time over coming months.”

This is totally the right thing to do, and I’m pleased to see that Lucas realizes that the creativity of his fans are an asset and not a liability; for years all he wanted was their wallets, but now he wants their minds as well. And at a time when so many big companies and directors are taking an “us versus them” mentality when it comes to things like Youtube and mash-ups, it’s nice to see that someone of Lucas’s stature (and former views) is changing his mind. As the Journal puts it: “While Lucasfilm could fight what amounts to the theft of its property, it has now decided to take the opposite tack. In doing so, it is tackling an issue that faces all media companies today: how to keep some semblance of control over intellectual property in the digital age.”

Wall Street Journal: Make-It-Yourself ‘Star Wars’