Today Instapundit pointed to this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on plagiarism among scholars. Which motivated me to go back and revisit Something Borrowed: Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life from The New Yorker a few weeks back. In it author Malcolm Gladwell uses the experience of his previous New Yorker article "Damaged" (1997) turning up in Bryony Lavery's play "Frozen" to question the cultural assumptions built around plagiarism and finds that "...instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause." He goes through a wonderful discussion of the derivative nature of music and observes:
A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, and that distinction, I realized, was what was missing from the discussion of Bryony Lavery’s borrowings. Yes, she had copied my work. But no one was asking why she had copied it, or what she had copied, or whether her copying served some larger purpose.And later:
We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another—think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from “The Silence of the Lambs.� Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match� a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched� any of the Times’ words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
I understand that plagiarism is a real problem that needs to be addressed, but in our technological age where we can lock down content to the point of pay per view, where we buy a license instead of a product, I'm more concerned about overzealous copyright claims and the obliteration of the constitutional guarantee of Fair Use.
