To successfully make an argument for Romeo & Juliet’s transcendent and doomed love story that has stayed relevant over the course of 500+ years, it’s important first to understand remix culture and creative commons, two essential features within the domain of copyright.

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Lawrence Lessig, father of Creative Commons within the publishing industry, has talked at length about copyright, the Mickey Mouse Act, and the culture around public domain. He argues, most famously, that people—publishers, and others in the communications circuit—want monopolies to stick around as they benefit from them. The public, however, is not as adamant about this, especially within the context of the Digital Age.

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Lessig argues that the catalyst of the public domain was tied to the Digital Age. In his eyes, copyright and its borders became blurred when the Internet changed the face of publishing. Creative Commons, a non-profit founded by Lessig, James Boyle, and Hal Abelson, seeks to expand and explore the public domain on the Internet, and connect and circulate published works of every kind with the world. Through this project, as well as his multiple TED Talks, Lessig highlights the crux of the new era of publishing and the public domain: everything is a copy, no idea is entirely original.

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While somewhat bleak at face value, Lessig’s hypothesis allows for a rather uplifting element: Within the public domain are works of the greats—Shakespeare included—and allows for these stories to be manipulated, remixed, and adapted to amend the storyline to fit within a modern context. The four examples shown within this project—the Luhrmann Romeo & Juliet, Love Story, Warm Bodies, and Now or Never—are allowed to remix Shakespeare’s original text to fit a very specific current context: a narrative that specifically targets teenagers tangled up in a doomed love. In this, Shakespeare’s original storyline, and its emphasis on the tragedy revolving around Romeo and Juliet’s fate being placed on the adults’ complacency, is shifted to a modern context—the tragedy within each of these examples is the inherent allure of both melodrama and adolescence.

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Lessig’s overarching point within his TED Talk on Re-examining the Remix is this: the public domain allows social creativity, which is expansive; compared to copyright allowing a closer-minded hierarchy. “And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art,” Lessig says, rather poignantly, showing how the public domain as a whole, and this specific example of Romeo & Juliet’s adaptations, is interrelated. Allowing copyright to fade into the public domain isn’t encouraging stealing or making continual copies of an original work—it allows this work to transform into a modern retelling that can connect us for generations, both to others and to the past.