« Allergy self-research | Main | But then there's this »
November 20, 2004
Property fundamentalism
Both Chris Bennem and Collin Brooke have written to alert me to a story in the November 22 issue of the New Yorker. And that publication, god bless 'em, has put Malcolm Gladwell's reflection on plagiarism on their open site, where non-subscribers (and those of us subscribers who live so far in the hinterlands that mail arrives by pack mule) can read it. Gladwell does a wonderful job of stating the commonsense notion of plagiarism:
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
But, gloriously, he goes on to examine the many ways in which this representation falls apart, and he coins the fabulous phrase, "property fundamentalism." Gladwell actually acknowledges that copyright law has veered too far away from the Constitutional assurance of fair use. Even more remarkably, he notes the legal and cultural differences between plagiarism and copyright and observes that plagiarism strictures are even more restrictive than copyright.
Posted by senioritis at November 20, 2004 08:00 AM