Thanks to Jordon for bringing this article from the New Yorker to my attention.
SOMETHING BORROWED
by MALCOLM GLADWELL
Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?
Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler
ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and
more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property.
In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. Courts
have become more willing to grant intellectual-property protections.
Fighting piracy has become an obsession with Hollywood and the
recording industry, and, in the worlds of academia and publishing,
plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much
closer to a crime. When, two years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin was found
to have lifted passages from several other historians, she was asked to
resign from the board of the Pulitzer Prize committee. And why not? If
she had robbed a bank, she would have been fired the next day.
Although I sympathize with the taking of a phrase
here or there, I do wish that Mr. Gladwell had brought up the other
side of the argument. As someone who makes his living off the written
word, he must know that there are lazy and unscrupulous people who
happily take what others have worked on and copy without any kind of
eye to homage or promotion of the work. They will then fight tooth and
nail to have their copy (that they copied) protected. I do think that
some of this could be solved by the simple practice of contacting
someone and just asking permission.
Sometimes we ask for an
excerpt from a publisher or writer and the charge is reasonable. If it is beyond
our means (and they are tiny means - microscopic really - did we mention we have no ads?), we
simply don't work with the material. If someone wants more payment than we can afford, no hard
feelings. They have the right to ask for that. They may have spent many
hard years eating noodle soup and now they need many more expensive
vitamins to keep up with daily life. We don't know and if they can get
a good wage somewhere that we can't give, great for them. There are many ways to say
something and although we are disappointed, we move on.
Much
of the talk of copyright is mixed up with the way copyright is being
held by large corporations such as Disney. But a lot of what is taken and
misused is written or drawn by some little person in front of a
computer or in a small studio. It's usually a person, the artist, that
is getting hurt when the work is not given its due credit.
