i was down on the farm this weekend, arguing with my mom and my ex-wife (a professional writer) about intellectual property. so anyway, a few thoughts:
things like science, history, and philosophy are collaborative/argumentative arenas. that's how they make progress. did einstein own special relativity? did crick and watson claim ownership of the double helix model of human dna? if they had claimed and been able to enforce such ownership, that would have unutterably impoverished human knowledge. i have given theories of knowledge and beauty. i don't even understand what it would mean to own such a thing, to try to hoard it or sell it. if i'm right about what knowledge is, do i own knowledge?
and the arts are very much the same. what if you let fielding patent the novel or petrarch the sonnet or kandinsky abstraction? well, why can't people own things like that, on an intellectual property model? who owns the twelve-bar structure of the blues, or the line "woke up this morning'? if louis armstrong takes buddy bolden's jazz and repeats it, then re-interprets it, then deconstructs it, is that theft? then there is no art that's not theft. if someone claimed to own things like this, they would be claiming the right to cut off a century-long history of amazing art, a whole portion of a culture (or really of all the world's cultures). could 'clueless' be a violation of jane austen's copyright? what if shakespeare's ghost or heirs were around, filing suit every time someone re-made or re-interpreted hamlet or a comedy of errors? all this stuff takes place within an unfolding history of appropriations and re-interpretations, and did way before there was such thing as cut-and-paste or digital sampling.
