Jonathan Lethem On Plagiarism

tmalone writes "This month's Harper's Magazine includes an excellent essay by the novelist Jonathan Lethem titled 'The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,' in which he discusses the public commons of ideas and the absurdity of restricting other peoples' right of second use. 'Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work.' Taking issue with the idea that any work is 'untainted' by others' ideas, he declares, 'Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony.' Later on he argues that 'Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act.' Lethem finishes up with simple request: 'Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions.' The best part of the essay is at the end when he provides a key to all of the sources he stole his ideas from."

Comments

Re:The /. headline is typically bad.

[NetSettler]

One man's "creative influence" could very well be one lawyer's "plagiarism". It is all a matter of degree.

There are surely gray areas, but your remark suggests there is nothing but gray areas, and I don't think that's true. Under the law, copyright protects the form of a work, not an idea. It comes right out and says that plainly, in a way that law doesn't always do. Just to make sure there is no confusion. As such, "creative influence" insofar as it is an "idea" is generally protected.

The author of the article seemed to speak at times as if he were arguing against things that are in fact not in play. It is considered fair use to quote one another in the course of public dialog. (The right of fair use happens to be implementationally threatened by coercive DRM attempting to conform to the DMCA, but that's a slightly different problem. I have argued (but so far have not managed to convince any actual lawyers) that the legal concept of an easement (from Real Estate law) needs to be injected into Intellectual Property law in order to address the present state of affairs in that regard. For rights to be meaningful, having some way to enforce them seems useful. There are a number of mechanisms for addressing infringement, but there needs to be a counterbalancing force to address fair use. That the US Government Copyright FAQ does not even mention "fair use" in the set of questions is perhaps telling in and of itself.)

It is trivially true that as you morph an idea from a single source, there is a point in which the idea is still so much the original that the new form carries with it no serious value and cannot legitimately be called its own work. So in this regard, your remark is technically correct.

However, another way of interpreting copyright might be not to regard it as a right of use, but a standard we hold ourselves to before we call something a contribution. That is, if I take a play you wrote, change a word or two, and then offer it back to the public, odds are the public will say "this wasn't a material contribution". Forget copyright issues, my obligation to say I have contributed something is higher. If I'm a writer, even a good one, and call a press conference every time I type a period or comma, eventually people will get tired. It's not a novel, or even a chapter, until a chunkier contribution has been made. And copyright just enforces that same notion, but between people instead of internally within them.

So maybe it is just a matter of degree after all. But maybe degree matters. Maybe the whole point is, as in Aristotle's Virtue Ethics that at either end of the spectrum is an "unreasonable extreme", and that there really is no well-defined, uniquely determined midpoint, but that the goal is to seek a balance in spite of that fact, so that one doesn't slide to one of the endpoints. To say that any contribution, no matter how trivial, that includes another's work is ok is to create spam. To say that any contribution, no matter how large, that includes another's work, is infringing is to create a society that doesn't grow through interaction.