John Oswald

born 1953 in Toronto, music and copyright critic. After experimenting with collage in the 1970s, Oswald published a text called «Plunderphonics» in 1985 in which he justified audio piracy as a compositional device. A record with the same title followed in 1988, taking the proposed cultural technology to musical extremes with the aid of digital sampling. Oswald used fragments from pieces by artistes including Michael Jackson, James Brown and the Beatles without acquiring the rights, but deliberately did not offer the disc for sale, he just gave it away. But Oswald's musically brilliant «electroquoting» still had to be suppressed because of complaints from the music business. This led to a broad front of supporters and imitators, and representatives of the idea of copyleft, which was to emerge much later; the «Napster» phenomenon also cited Oswald's influence.