I recommend this article by Jonathan Lethem. It’s a funny, serious essay on intellectual and property rights. It also includes a clever works appropriated section at the end. Lethem basically argues for a realistic and reasonable understanding of how creative works are created (he even ventures briefly, but fascinatingly, into the realm of natural sciences). For Lethem, the world is awash in plagiarism, some good and some bad. Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita, is no less important once we learn that he might have lifted the story (down to the name of the title character) from some one named Heinz von Lichberg. Lethem, drawing on surrealist ideas of newness, is a proponent of the idea that art must be at least in part a gift culture, not exclusively a commodity culture. He doesn’t advocate the kind of plagiarism that we think of as immoral (“For the moment I’m grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time…you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies”), but he is all for an abandonment of copyright law as it is currently understood. To this end, he’s waived most of the movie rights to his current novel, You Don’t Love Me, Yet (which I’m currently enjoying), and he’s put up a bunch of short stories and song lyrics on his website for use in films and dramatic adaptations and new music.
The idea of intellectual property has fascinated me for a few years; it was one of the things that got me interested in studying law, though I’ve lost sight of that in recent months. I could easily see myself dealing with these kinds of things as a profession. I’m in agreement with much of what Lethem has to say. Without the ability to borrow and be influenced we lose the ability to create. In writing this blog, I’ve often found myself re-appropriating things my friends, family, and TV/Radio/Books/Internet have said. More often than not my sentence is in a different context and often modified to fit my needs, but I’m still taking from others and, in the most negative phrasing, passing it off as my own. Of course, those originators are probably often not the originators either. Lethem would say, and I would agree, that there’s no need to be concerned with these kinds of appropriations and re-appropriations and re-re-appropriations, it’s just the way the world works. The lines between appropriation and theft can be thin, but it seems to often be clear. One could divide the plaigarisms into the important, benign and the malicious. If this true, then in designing and implementing our laws, we ought to be concerned with protecting from the malicious and encouraging the important. I’m no legal expert (yet), but it seems that our laws should be able to serve a proactive purpose and not just a prohibitive one.
