Use of The Internet
Mee began using the internet as a textual source for composing his pieces in the early 1990s. He first began making his own work freely available by posting three of his plays on Carnegie Mellon’s humanities gopher/ftp/telnet English Server in the mid 1990s. By 1996, with the help of his friend Tom Damrauer, the (re)making project, a web site with his full scripts was launched. It contained an invitation for people to “do freely whatever they want with them.” He is the first and only playwright to make such a large body of theatre work available on the internet.
This was not viewed by Mee as a challenge to the current copyright law or a vehicle to raise issues of intellectual property. It was done as a populist gesture towards his utopian vision of a free and democratic internet. In 1996 he said "I’m attracted to the idea of things being owned in common." It also represented "Mee’s Golden Rule: of do unto my writing as I have done unto the writing of others."
National Public Radio called Mee the "Public-Domain Playwright" in 2000 and credited him with touching "a raw cultural nerve" by making his work freely available.
Writer Jonathan Lethem credited Charles Mee as one of the inspirations for his "Promiscuous Project" in which he made a selection of his stories available for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt at a dollar apiece.
In an explanation about the (re)making project on his current web site, Mee says that his plays are protected by copyright if they are “essentially or substantially performed” as he has composed them. He continues, however, to invite others to freely pillage his texts to make their own work, without any attribution to him.
Read more about this topic: Charles L. Mee