What if you were the guy who had the idea for optical storage of digital audio and video, and who made the idea a reality by recording a television show on an optical disc in the mid-1970s … and you couldn’t even take a sip from the gravy train that rolled through once the rest of the world caught up to your boldly imagined innovation?
Sometimes I’ll get on a bit of an information-wants-to-be-free kick. In fact, I’m having a great time experimenting with open-source php scripts at work right now. But just when I start to get big utopian thoughts, I read an article like this one, and I think that I must never, ever lose sight of basic issues of intellectual property and fair compensation.
Your post reminded me of this article in The New Yorker I read last week. A slightly different take on the legal issues of intellectual property and copyright, and, in this case, the ethical issue of plagiarism. Money isn’t the real point of contention in this case but rather sense of identity and self (and if those can be “borrowed” in the name of art).
It is easy to oversimplify these matters, but there are real and complicated issues at stake.
It’s interesting to me (but not surprising) that the oversimplification occurs on both sides of the issue.
I don’t think I entirely buy Gladwell’s implicit assertion that art has no ethical responsibility to the reality from which
it draws its materials, but I agree wholeheartedly that there’s a difference between derivative borrowing and transformative
borrowing. That said, his musical examples conveniently overlook “Surfin’ USA,” which is a rewrite of “Sweet Little Sixteen”
and which now bears the credit of Chuck Berry as author, as well as “Come Together,” which Berry also received a settlement
for (though he gets no writing credit). The latter song presents a more complicated problem–I’d argue that the borrowing
is transformative–but “Surfin’ USA” does deserve to have a Chuck Berry credit, though not for the entire song.
Yet it’s still true that if the transformative borrowing defaces the original, an original that’s still in view, and it’s
not a parody, there are ethical issues involved.