Anything New Under the Sun?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Jonathan Lethem’s justly celebrated Harper’s article on the pervasiveness of plagiarism is featured in the WaPo:
After 10 pages of carefully constructed argument against “those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other,” Lethem reveals that just about every line in his piece is something he “stole, warped, and cobbled together” from the work of others. He then annotates his borrowings, reporting, for example, that the “culture as a market” quote derives from “The Tyranny of Copyright?,” by Robert Boynton, in the New York Times Magazine.
The idea of making a case for originality based on copying appears charmingly novel. But after twice being asked by law review editors to provide a citation for the thesis statement of an article (can the article cite itself?), I’m beginning to think that perhaps even Lethem’s idea is not all that unprecedented. We lawyers are forced to disclaim our originality all the time. . . . even in a medium like the article, where novelty is supposed to be a sine qua non. I have to wonder what other writings would look like if all the borrowing had to be as transparent (or were as valued) as ours.
Here’s one more celebration of Lethem’s essay:
It’s a passionate salvo in the copyright wars, a crowd of voices coralled together to say, basically: without borrowing, stealing, cribbing, remixing, mashing-up, collaging and compiling — without influences great and small, in other words — there is no “creating.” No hip hop, sure, but also no blues, no Disney, no Shakespeare. No Lolita or “I have a dream.” We’d be reduced to staring at campfires and barking at one another.
Woof! [approvingly]
May 17, 2007 at 10:29 am
Posted in: Intellectual Property
Print This Post
Responses (4)
James Grimmelmann - May 17, 2007 at 11:51 am
You should refuse. This particular version of the citation fetish is a false transplant of the norms of citation in legal practice, where the citation to authority establishes the actuality of the claimed legal rule. That norm has no valid application to those parts of an academic article that state the author’s novel thesis.
Bruce Boyden - May 17, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Lethem’s article is interesting, but it’s hardly a blistering new critique of copyright law:
Emerson v. Davies, 8 F. Cas. 615, 619 (C.C.D. Mass. 1845) (No. 4,436) (Story, J.).
Rebecca Tushnet - May 18, 2007 at 3:11 pm
That’s a good law review story. My best so far was an attempt to take the contraction out of ‘you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’ Fortunately, the editors relented.
Ann Bartow - May 20, 2007 at 12:28 pm
I got asked to provide a citation for the assertion that public roads are useful. I had to wonder how those law review editors got between their homes and their law school each day.
Leave a Reply