The next time a friend sends you a text message asking some annoying question such as who they should vote for on American Idol, imagine that instead of just ignoring the text, you can send them a clip from a movie or TV show, asking them to 'use the Force, Luke'.
This is one of the dreams of an Israeli company called Anyclip, whose grand vision, according to a recent report in The New York Observer, is to turn film studio vaults into a database accessible to users of the internet and mobile devices everywhere.
Earlier this month, the company went public with its first humble product, a Facebook.com application called Casting Couch that lets you 'tag' your friends' names on to characters in famous movie scenes, and share these witty associations with as many more friends as you want.
The premise of Casting Couch is the marginally clever realisation that movies are so much a part of our lives that we often use quotes from them to tell people how we're feeling or even to help describe what just happened to us.
At present, Casting Couch has scenes from a couple of dozen movies for tagging, including The Godfather, Animal House, Shaun of the Dead and others. Creatively speaking, Anyclip's ideas aren't terribly exciting. Inserting clips into digital conversations seems a small step up from emoticons.
And though appropriation can be quite creative - there are plenty of fan films out there that attest to this - the general rule seems to be that as appropriation is made easier and more automatic, it comes closer and closer to mere parroting.