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

well

[macadamia_harold]

All I have to say is, 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.

The /. headline is typically bad.

[Kadin2048]

The guy isn't talking about plagiarism; he calls the essay "a plagiarism" with (IMO) tongue planted in cheek. It's not correct to say that it's about plagiarism specifically, because to say that sounds like he's defending plagiarism specifically, when the issues covered in the essay itself are far more broad.

The essay is "on" creative influence, not plagiarism.

Re:The /. headline is typically bad.

[truckaxle]

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

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.

Re:The /. headline is typically bad.

[NetSettler]

We need to keep the concepts of plagarism and copyright seperate in our thinking.

Under normal circumstances, I'd agree. However, the article (and I admit I read about half of it in detail and then barely skimmed the rest) didn't seem to me to be about plagiarism, which is (I assume) why the subject line upthread is "The /. headline is typically bad." It really seems to be an article about information-sharing, not about plagiarism. He cites numerous well-known authors with apparent (but seemingly ill-founded) concern that they have plagiarized, but I would say that the fact that those various authors were not discredited is illustrative of the power of both fair use and established/approved literary techniques such as homage, parody, etc.

The examples he uses really seem to me to illustrate that the existing system is in balance already... or has been until recently. (None of my remarks should be taken as an endorsement of the new trends introduced by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).)

As to calling things contributions, perhaps it might help to name the contributions we claim where we can. We should not denigrate even the smallest honest contributions. And a small contributor today may be a large contributor next year.

To the extent that your remark can be construed as an affirmation of the age-old line "one man's trash is another man's treasure", I certainly don't mean to detract from it. But I still have some concerns that your suggestion is not strong enough to really solve the problem. (My remarks here ran longer than I wanted, and I edited them down a bit. I hope the result isn't incoherent as a result.)

The problem is not that people can't or shouldn't start with small contributions and grow them to big ones. The problem is that referring to something by its history or pedigree is not the same intellectual activity as referring to something by class. One can trivially, but uselessly, describe a pedigree system as a class system, by saying that every pedigree names a class, but it defeats the ability to do generalized reference to something because each name is so heavily overloaded that short names start to have no meaning. As I was reading one of the books in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game trilogy, there was reference to a hierarchically oriented net that sounded like the idea that kids grew up posting in their town and if they gained enough stature, they were allowed to post nationally, and so on. There are obvious disadvantages of this when some governments are repressive, but just because something has disadvantages doesn't mean it's got no advantages. There's some value to saying that people should not post their first grade homework for world-wide scrutiny on usenet.

And note that I'm not trying to say that textual size implies importance. It probably tends to be correlated, but it's possibly different. A remark like "Fixed a big security hole." might be accompanied by a one-line change and yet the change might be a substantive contribution. But most small changes are not of that kind. And documenting that you only did a small change doesn't fix that--rather, it invites people to so overwhelm people with documentation that you can't tell it was just a small change. That's how lawyers have learned to address requirements for disclosure: don't withhold, but instead drown the opposition in so much disclosure that they can't find the thing they care about.

So I'm leary that encouraging "disclosure" as a standard for saying you made a contribution is, while a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.

Perhaps Shaw said it best

[justthinkit]

The problem:
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. - George Bernard Shaw

Leading to this accepting attitude adjustment:
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. - GBS

Re:Perhaps Shaw said it best

[z-j-y]

I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

that's what he thinks.

Re:Perhaps Shaw said it best

[Hognoxious]

There is only one thing worse than being George Bernard Shaw.

Right but that doesn't fall in line with Disney's

[gd23ka]

take on intellectual property. Try to publish a cartoon featuring a mermaid or a
bunch of talking mice and their _ligitation_ department _will_ open fire on you.
Plunder my vision.. indeed.

Wow, great article.

[88NoSoup4U88]

Whereas it's not usual around here ;) I read the article, and I think he makes some excellent points.
The Slashdot headline is a bit misleading as it isn't only about plagiarism, but more about the influence of external factors/one's environment on the output of an artist:

Whereas the author cites a few real cases of famous writers of the past literally copying other people's work, he makes a good case that most of that has unknowingly been used: The author's quote :

...Most artists are converted to art by art itself

seems to be very true.

From my personal experience I can say that the previous quote, and the article's explanation of how one gets influenced by his/her environment to produce an artwork, is very true (in my case, that is).
For me my big inspirations were architecture and games, which both formed me into my hobby/work I do nowadays (leveldesigner).

Other influences (of particular my gaming-past) only became apparent when the other day, I finished a gamedesign document (of a GPL-ed game I am working on) and showed it to some co-developers, who almost immedeately recognised and pointed out the various game elements/style from my most beloved games of the past, which I'd unknowingly woven into the total design. (to name a few; Lazy Jones, Jumpman, various NES/SNES classics)
Whereas I didn't anticipate on creating clones of those games, I'd somehow formed my idea around it (and -enhanced- it), by the external imprints of the past.

It's a shame that nowadays people/companies are becoming overeager to try to squash any sort of infringement on their work (I'm not talking about blatant copyright infringements), whereas most of the times the artists only builds on the existing intellectual property, thus imo enhancing it for people who are interested in views from third-parties (one could compare it to Mods for games).
To point out the computer-art bit some more; I'd like to think that the GPL is a prime example of how proper 'plagiarism' can take place, and create several new/enhanced products, as GPL-ed code is still attributing the initial authors/source, and on top of that there is the obligation to release the source too; Making the whole art-foodchain bigger and better.

Now if only the big media conglomerates would start to see that, for example, Dangermouse's "Grey"-album (which mixed the Jay-Z's "open-sourced" beats of his "Black"-album, with the Beatle's "White"-album) was an excellent example of how different age-groups can get exposed to the oldies: Thus, in the end, making more sales.

Getting paid

[digitalhermit]

I don't mind people copying all the docs I've written.. Most are GPL anyway. But I remember one particular guy... One day he writes me and asks all sorts of questions about printing in Linux. He asks for examples, he asks me to explain how the print system works. At first I started answering him then I just point him to my online docs. I don't hear from him again. Months later I'm browsing another site and find an article about Linux printing. It sounds vaguely familiar. Sure enough, the bastard had pretty much taken my emails and the structure of my docs and submitted it for pay as his own to an online documentation site. Not a single reference to my docs, even though he cut/pasted whole sentences. Bastard.

Re:Straw men considered highly inflammable

[PopeRatzo]

ThurlMakes7, read this article again a few years after you've graduated or dropped out and get back to me.

And no, "we" don't always know originality when we see it. Many need to have it explained to us. This is why people like you take lit-crit classes and learn words like "structuralism". Trust me, it's my business to recognize y'all. I get paid well to read your papers and give you grades so you can go about spending your parents' money thinking you're smart.

Jonathan Lethem (please learn to spell the man's name before you mention him in the context of "crit-lit") isn't trying to say our ancestors speak through us, he's saying that we can only give back what we've taken in. Some of us can do it in original ways.

As someone who's actually read Lethem's novels, I'd highly recommend them to any of you who like to read. And don't worry too much about originality or influences. Just love what you love.

The article

[Konster]

The article itself is a massively wordy orgy of bullshit and bananas, written by a person that's clearly trying way too fucking hard to write. The writer violates a basic concept of writing, and writing well; get your point across with as few words as possible.

Language as art is a wonderful thing; trying to couch it as something that it isn't in a really wordy...wordy...wordy...essay isn't art, and you lose the point of your essay in the process, which is another way of saying you talk too much without saying anything new or interesting or anything of value.

Really, this article applies to writing doctorates (snicker) and people overseeing those efforts. The rest of the world won't care...or worse yet, hope a well written version of the bullshit will appear in Reader's Digest.

Re:Straw men considered highly inflammable

[Znork]

"but we still know originality when we hear it and see it"

Or we know originality when we dont hear and see the sources.

As the patent office has been so apt at demonstrating, a failure to find the sources and an unfamiliarity with the subject is easily mistaken for originality.

It's not really eveb a question of derivatives or plagiarism, it's merely the fact that when you have five billion monkeys banging along from more or less the same starting point, quite a lot of them are bound to hit the same keys by pure chance. And the human mind combines and extrapolates much less randomly than pure chance.

Great minds may think alike, and these days we have a lot of great minds, and a far more level starting point with the rapid and free flow of information.

Gladwell on "Plagiarism"

[rubberpaw]

As has been pointed out, this essay isn't particularly unique. It's just stating the rather obvious point that lots of people are inspired by other people, and that when we make things, we often reshuffle bits of stuff we like. This practice is so common that it's not too interesting to point out. The article is clever, interesting, perhaps, but I wouldn't mod it insightful. The idea of creative reuse is the very basis of formal study of literature, music, and art-- why else spend hours, weeks, months reading, viewing, sampling, and arguing about the greats if not to enjoy them and learn how they work?

The Harper's article really isn't that much about plagiarism, and it also doesn't really address the questions of copyright very thoroughly-- he dismisses it as "rapacious" and makes some aside references to Jefferson.

A few years ago, in "Something Borrowed", Malcolm Gladwell looks at the personal story of a psychiatrist whose personal memoir is "plagiarized" by a playwright who writes a semi-successful play about the psychiatrist and her clients-- without consulting the psychiatrist or clients. Gladwell looks into issues about copyright, intellectual property, and the creative commons, but he also looks at the public and emotional effects in the lives of the psychiatrist (who feels "violated" by this appropriation of her life), and the playwright (who feels heartbroken, confused--devastated by the stigma and bad press). It's an awesome article.

It's actually worse than you think

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/29/disney_hijack ing_ali.html

The linked story points out that Disney is trying to trademark characters from the Grimm Bros. in New Zealand.

Re:Straw men considered highly inflammable

[phatlipmojo]

It's Lethem who's a product of structuralist lit-crit classes, not me.

So you don't actually know what you're talking about, then?

For that matter, it doesn't even sound like you read the essay; he's not saying anything of the kind. It's more of an on-the-shoulders-of-giants position that a there-are-really-only-3-stories position.

(Funny quip about everything is regurgitated. Though having giggled at it, I can't help wondering if you're actually mixing the author up with Jonathan Safran Foer.)

Copyright Originally Covered 14 Years, Unless...

[BoRegardless]

...the author was still alive when the copyright was allowed to then extend for another 14 years.

Then came the 'corporate authors', publishers if you will, and Disney has lots of money to spread around to PACs and other politically influencial uses such that they simply purchased a change in U.S. law allowing them to "keep" something they were not entitled to have at the time various copyrighted items were created.

That was changing the law 'after the fact'. But the political monies were acceptable as we have established proper procedures for use in Washington D.C. when we need to go to get laws changed, so it is no longer a crime, as long as we "follow the laws".

The laws don't allow bribes to be given directly to lawmakers, so we give them to ex-lawmakers who are now middlemen who accept the monies (& their former staff who often seem to move with them), who then go to 'seek favor' from the current lawmakers which will in turn some day become ex-lawmaker/lobbyists.

So bribery is not a crime once you institutionalize it by giving it a new name "lobbying", but plagarism is still plagarism and you can get kicked out of school or a job because of it?

Jonathan Lethem's Harper article "'The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" was thought provoking in many ways.

Re:Straw men considered highly inflammable

[Selanit]

The parent poster said:

Taking issue with the idea that any work is 'untainted' by others' ideas.

Um, have you ever heard anyone express this idea? Me neither, it's completely absurd.

Absurd it may be, but that doesn't stop people from suing one another over such 'taints.' I direct your attention to the case of Alice Randall. In 2001 she published a novel "The Wind Done Gone," a parodic re-telling of "Gone With the Wind." Margaret Mitchell's estate sued Randall, alleging plagiarism. Her book was too similar to Mitchell's; it was, in fact, "tainted." The case was eventually settled out of court.

And again, consider Kaavya Viswanathan. Last year she published a romance novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life." Then it was alleged that substantial portions of the novel had been adapted from Megan McCafferty's novels "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." The publisher recalled "Opal Mehta" and canceled Viswanathan's contract. Viswanathan claimed she had internalized McCafferty's work so thoroughly that she reproduced the passages unconsciously and unintentionally. Regardless of whether the "plagiarism" was intentional or not, Viswanathan's gained a reputation as a plagiarist that's going to follow her for years. You might say she's "tainted."

And finally, may I point out that Shakespeare ripped off basically everything he ever wrote? He plundered everything he could lay his hands on. Macbeth came straight out of Holinshed's "Chronicles." In Midsummer Night's Dream, the play that the rustics put on mid-way through derives from Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Romeo and Juliet was taken from a contemporary poem, "The Tragical Historie of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brookes. Yup - all "tainted."

This is what Lethem is talking about: our greatest artists routinely rip off their predecessors. That's just how it works. Or rather, how it always has. These days, we're more likely to see a corporate lawyer drive a copyright through the heart of the next Shakespeare. Lovely.

An Idea Is Not A Possession

[reallocate]

An idea is not a possession. But, a book is. Or, whatever. It's impossible to claim ownership of or rights to an idea -- it's literally impossible to own the unownable -- so all the arguments about copyright and ideas are off the point at best, and FUD at worst.

However, it's obvious we can claim ownership of books, or any other object that records language, whether that language is spoken, sung, mathematical, algorithmic, or musical. In every instance, someone will possess the very first, original, version of such a work. That person -- barring prior legal arrangements -- owns that work and possess all rights inherent in it. That means no one has the right to copy any portion of it without permission, and that permission comes from the work's creator. (Fair use, etc., are elements of the prior legal arrangement that the creator must accept by virture of living in a country with copyright laws.)

If the work's creator sells a publisher the right to make copies in return for royalties, then anyone who purchases a copy from the publisher only acquires those rights sold to him by the work's creator via the publisher.

None of this is to argue that a work's creator has any ownership of or rights to the ideas in his or her work. A work is specifically intended to create and manipulate the thoughts and emotions of others.

Nor is it an argument to support the current abuses of copyright. The effective way to deal with abuse of an equitable law is to constrain the abusers and eliminate the abuse, not to challenge them with another kind of abuse. (Two can always play at that game, so success today mght be replaced by defeat tomorrow.) If you don't think the copyright law is equitable (assuming you've read it) then it's fair game for change, too.

But, let's try to keep things grounded appropriately. Copyright law isn't there to keep you from stealing ideas. It's there to keep you from stealing and misusing actual physical things. And, no one would deny that all creative, academic, scientific, journalistic, etc., draws on the ideas and effortrs of others. That's called culture. But, copying chunks of something that you did not create and claiming them as your own is always that particular kind of theft called plagiarism.

Re:An Idea Is Not A Possession

[zotz]

"In every instance, someone will possess the very first, original, version of such a work. That person -- barring prior legal arrangements -- owns that work and possess all rights inherent in it."

OK, and this is so as long as they keep it private or secret as it were.

I think your theory breaks down when you get to publishing as we do it today.

Now, if at every step in the chain, transfers were made with negotiated contracts, the original author might be able to retain those rights except as released via contract. Sort of like trade secrets are handled these days perhaps.

Other than that, once published and in the hands of the public, while the author might still have control over that original physical copy, the work itself is now out in the public domain in the absence of copyright law.

Copyright law is the government stepping into the free market and granting monopolies to the authors. I think this is thought to make the market better as it takes away the need to have a contract with every person you sell a book to for instance.

Now, to go back to your views and ask a question:

If it shouldn't be like I write but should be like you write, wouldn't that mean that something like the joke police at the office water cooler would be warranted? That people would have no legal right to tell jokes they heard on the radio last night? (Or are jokes one of those things that we do not grant copyright monopolies on?)

all the best,

drew

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zotzbr o&search=Search

Re:An Idea Is Not A Possession

[reallocate]

>>" at every step in the chain, transfers were made with negotiated contracts.."

The transfer to a publisher is a matter of contract. The publisher cannot transfer to you any rights it did not acquire from the work's creator. That means a purchaser does not have the right, for example, to make and distribute multiple copies of a work unless the work's creator transferred those rights, via the publisher.

There is no place for anyone to acquire those rights other than by transfer from the work's creator.

>"Copyright law is the government stepping into the free market and granting monopolies to the authors. I think this is thought to make the market better as it takes away the need to have a contract with every person you sell a book to for instance."

The purpose of copyright law is to encourage the production of creative works by guaranteeing that a work's creator has a chance to derive financial benefit from his work, and to protect that work from alteration and distortion. It is not a grant of monoploy. It's a recognition of, and protection of, the existence of rights that occur naturally when we create something. Very few people could devote a career to, say, writing novels, if anyone could grab the first copy off the printing press, start copying it and compete with them for sales. Very few of us would devote a career to any kind of creative work if we had no way of keeping others from altering our work and marketing it under their name. E.g., if it wasn;t for copyright law, you could copy Picasso print, slap your name on them, and sell them as yours. Or, I could grab all off Slashdot's code, open a site called Slashdot, start selling ads, and the current proprietors could do nothing to stop me. In those circumstance, I doubt Picasso would have painted or that Slashdot would exist.

>>"...are jokes one of those things that we do not grant copyright monopolies on?"

Repeating or reciting something you've read is not copying the physical object on which language encoding that joke was originally placed. (I suppose a comedian could go after another comedian who stole his material, but I'd consider it an abuse of law if that same comedian came after people repeating his jokes in the office. Remember, abuse of the law does not mean the law is bad. It means the abuser is bad.)

Your reference to "public domain" presupposes the notion that, in the absence of law, anything that anyone makes would be owned by everyone else, not by the person who made the thing. If you'll think about that, you will understand how invalid that is. Being in the "public domain" is a status granted and regulated by the law of man, not of nature.

Re:An Idea Is Not A Possession

[zotz]

"The transfer to a publisher is a matter of contract."

Yes.

"The publisher cannot transfer to you any rights it did not acquire from the work's creator."

In the absence of copyright law, it is not the publisher who would grant me any rights exactly. It is the act of publishing. And since you gave him the right to publish...

If you didn;t like that outcome, you would be free to insist that a printer get a signed contract with each book transfer that would bind the purchaser or some such.

"The purpose of copyright law is to encourage the production of creative works by guaranteeing that a work's creator has a chance to derive financial benefit from his work"

Yes.

"It is not a grant of monoploy."

Oh, but it is. I am not saying it is a particularly bad example if done right, but it is one none the less.

"It's a recognition of, and protection of, the existence of rights that occur naturally when we create something."

This is not so and most of human history bears this out.

"Very few people could devote a career to, say, writing novels, if anyone could grab the first copy off the printing press, start copying it and compete with them for sales."

Any yet many people are now making careers writing Free Software under just such conditions. I think we are going to start seeing the same thing in other fields as time goes on. People are already writing the licenses in anticipation of this and some are writing the works and using the licenses.

"E.g., if it wasn;t for copyright law, you could copy Picasso print, slap your name on them, and sell them as yours."

No, we could easily have a law against plagiarism to stop that. You don't need to mix the two concepts to make your point.

Copyright law only needs to stop you from copying a Picasso print with his name on it and selling the copies.

"Or, I could grab all off Slashdot's code, open a site called Slashdot, start selling ads, and the current proprietors could do nothing to stop me."

Sort of like what you can get from here:

http://www.slashcode.com/about.shtml

you mean?

"In those circumstance, I doubt Picasso would have painted or that Slashdot would exist."

Who knows what any particular individual would have done? Certainly copyright law is premised (in some places at least) on the thought that more will create in the presence of copyright pretections afforded them by law, and I do not need to argue for or against that.

Still you ignore history as there still exist in this world many works of art from the days before there was nay copyright law.

Also, look into the fashion industry today. I hear that in many countries if not all, they operate without the benefit of copyright protections.

"Repeating or reciting something you've read is not copying the physical object on which language encoding that joke was originally placed."

So what, all we have to do to be cool in your view with respect to copyright is to pull a Fahrenheit 451?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

Just get everyone to memorise a chapter of any book we want to copy. Have them recite it while another person copies it down. Publish the new "version" and all is ok? Certainly not with any copyright law I am aware of today. What is your take on this?

"Your reference to "public domain" presupposes the notion that, in the absence of law, anything that anyone makes would be owned by everyone else, not by the person who made the thing."

You are incorrect here. It maintains that anything anyone publishes becomes "public domain" in the absence of copyright law. Not anything anyone makes... anything they publish...

"Being in the "public domain" is a status granted and regulated by the law of man, not of nature."

We obviously disagree on this point big time.

all the best,

drew

Re:An Idea Is Not A Possession

[Dun Malg]

The purpose of copyright law is to encourage the production of creative works by guaranteeing that a work's creator has a chance to derive financial benefit from his work, and to protect that work from alteration and distortion. ... It's a recognition of, and protection of, the existence of rights that occur naturally when we create something. I love to hear your substantiation of the assertion that there is a natural right to control one's intellectual creations. Before copyright, the very idea would have been considered ridiculous. Imagine a tribe of stone-age folks: Thag tells a story around the campfire about the moon god. He mostly just makes it up as he goes along. It's a good story. A couple weeks later, Grod is delivering obsidian arrow heads to the tribe in the next valley and stays overnight. At the campfire, Grod tells Thag's moon god story, adding a few embellishments. Where does the "natural right" of Thag to control the story occur? Thag has lost nothing. Where would one even get the notion that there is any property right to something as insubstantial as a story? Copyright is purely an outgrowth of the publishing industry, and is wholly unnatural.

Re:An Idea Is Not A Possession

[zotz]

"You consider that moral?"

Yes indeed. And even reallocate would seem to from what I can gather of his writing in this thread, and until I read your post, he wasthe most over the top person I had ever encountered when it comes to copyright.

Reallocate would say that you can tell the story, you just can't make physical copies.

However, I do consider your proposition that caveman Bob would ask for permission to retell a story amusing.

Please. Give us examples from history where the world functioned as you propose.

However, if you think it is imoral. I suggest that nothing is stopping you from doing the moral thing as you see it. Each time you tell a joke, send some money to the creator or his heirs. Each time you use the number zero, send some money to an arab charity. Each time you use some geometry (fudge here, I think you get the point, I don't wish to do the research now, I am not well) send some money to a greek charity. Don't watch or purchase anything by Disney, etc. where they waited for a work to pass into the public domain before making their adaptation. I could go on.

Honestly, the world you guys envision would be stagnant and repressive.

all the best,

drew

Copyright pollution anyone?

[zotz]

Hmm. Your post convinced me to start this off even though I don't think I am ready to.

I have been thinking lately about "copyright pollution" where the copyrighted works of others gets in our heads and pollutes them to to point where what then comes out of us is "tainted" as it were.

Now this should not really be that much of an issue in a sensible legal environment, but I think we may not be in such an environment now and I also think that those forces causing that environment to deteriorate for a good while now are still at work trying to make it worse.

Are we getting to the point, or will we get there in our lifetimes, where an artist cannot afford to pay attention to, watch, look at, read, etc. any works that are not in the public domain or that carry a free license of some sort? Sort of like where people say we are today with respect to software patents.

all the best,

drew

http://musicians.opensrc.org/DrewRoberts

RTFA

[AdonaiElohim]

Judging from a lot of the comments so far... are people really incapable of seeing what the author was trying to do here? Read the thing. Do you really still need it spelled out for you? Then read on. It's an essay about the universal practice of taking uncredited quotes from previous artists... MADE UP LARGELY of quotes from previous artists. It's a literary game. An attempt to prove a point. A clever idea imperfectly executed. He is trying to literally show the reader that almost anything you see or hear, Disney or not, probably contains many echoes of previous works by great artists. Get it?

Re:There is no bright line.

[NetSettler]

Under the law, copyright protects the form of a work, not an idea.

In the case of music, for instance, where is the line between idea and form? George Harrison got sued and lost for subconsciously copying two motifs totaling 9 notes from "He's So Fine" by Ronald Mack into his own "My Sweet Lord" and adding different lyrics.

This is a fair example to raise for discussion, and I'm happy to engage it.

Here is how I break down that situation:

First, there are certainly always "edge issues" for anything small. Can one copyright a fortune cookie? A haiku? What is fair use when you want to quote part of a fortune cookie? None of these are easy issues, but I think the practical answer is "notwithstanding copyright, don't bet your fortune on copyrighting something so tiny that people are likely to reproduce it". So from the side of the person who did originate the work, I think they should enjoy flimsy protection not because I don't value a crisp statement but because I think there's too much societal good in being able to compose sentences. Another way of sayng what I'm saying is that I am fine about the idea of saying that anything shorter than x words can't be copyrighted. It's not chunky enough. And that saying this is so is not enough to refute the goodness of copyright.

In a sense, music has this problem all over because, like some forms of digitized computer stuff, there just aren't that many ways to do certain things. Computer Science people have no business copyrighting (or patenting--a separate can of worms) small things like xor or an assignment statement. A trivial exhaustive search would find certain alleged "protected works", and that should be proof of obviousness (while for patents it's taken as infringement, which seems inane in small search spaces).

The idea of copyrighting a few notes, therefore, seems silly to me. Though obviously there's nothing silly about the dire consequences of the present system, which admits the possibility. I just don't think the problem is copyright or law. I think it's courts and lawyers and maybe even juries. We've taken all the judgment out of judging, and told people to be ultra-literal and that using their hearts and minds is not allowed. Something wrong there, and no wonder we get to odd rulings. So that suits like the one you describe occur seems more like an abuse of the courts and/or ineffective counsel than really a material breakdown in the copyright system. The core value of copyright seems to me to be that, Jabberwocky notwithstanding, people mostly don't memorize long written works and so don't accidentally regurgitate them. Music, by contrast, is often memorized and integrated in a way that makes it possible to regurgitate accidentally. As a consequence, I'd easily be swayed by an argument that music should be under different forms of protection than written works. I've made similar arguments for software patents.

I've argued that software copyright neglects some basic concepts, one of which is something I call convergence issues. (And perhaps there's an analogy to music.) There is work that is done for "best practice" reasons and work that is done for "creative" reasons, but copyright law does not distinguish. If I assign to you to write a paper on Truth and you turn in the same essay as your classmate, you should get an F. But if I assign you to write a program that tests truth of the combination of booleans, you should get an F if you don't get the same answer as most of your classmates, since there's a convergent solution. Programming is an engineering discipline, and we value convergence in engineering tasks. While writing is a divergent discipline, and we value individuality. Yet copyright sees the two the same, and that matters if you're going to claim that "having converged" is the test of "infringement".

We want the choice by a computer to use a square box or rounded-edge bo

So _that's_ the sound of points being missed.

[wavedeform]

What everyone seems to be missing is that this essay is pretty much all "plagiarized" . The section titled "KEY: I IS ANOTHER" lists his sources and discusses his methodology.

He's making his point by putting together other people's words (and ideas) to craft his message. Very clever, in a meta sort of way, IMO.

Re:There is no bright line.

[k_187]

"The question, therefore, is whether defendant took from plaintiff's works so much of what is pleasing to the ears of lay listeners, who comprise the audience for whom such popular music is composed, that defendant wrongfully appropriated something which belongs to the plaintiff." 905 F.2d 731 at 734

Thus, if the intended audience's "untutored judgment" (328 F.3d 848 at 856) would confuse the two, the works are substantially similar.

Re:There is no bright line.

[k_187]

Well, as your link states, Harrison was boned. While copyright allows for independent creation, access + substantial similarity == infringement. Intention to copy has nothing to do with it.