Open Source Content?
The idea that culture can be property—intellectual property—is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Corporations like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop owners who play background music in their stores; students and scholars are shamed from placing texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same time, copyright is revered by most established writers and artists as a birthright and bulwark, the source of nurture for their infinitely fragile practices in a rapacious world. Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.
We have discussed the niggely-piggely gritty of content rights in terms of copyrights and copyleft, and probably most of us have come away confused and fearful of even quoting someone elses work. Jonathan Lethem proposes a different view of “plaigiarism’ and in that vein, “copyright”. Take a few moments to read the thing all the way through, then file it away in your mind for a few days. Apply it to instances of “intellectual content” that constantly swirl about us, and see if your views change.
