Original thought; not
In our world where everything seems to merit a copyright, I’ve decided that I’m jealous of the people that lived centuries ago. Why? Because they didn’t have the IP police standing in judgement over every single uttered turn of phrase. In a world where there were only a few hundred books lying about in the local library, and where there was only one big title on the shelf of every home, you could actually have an original thought.
Time Magazine has an article this week about the authorship of a familiar prayer. I won’t cite either, because then I’d have to deal with what “fair use” entails, but the jist of the story is that we live in a world where original thought is hard to prove. If I come up with a catchy phrase, who is to know that I’m not lifting it from something I heard back in third grade? Could that thought be an echo of a TV program watched one afternoon before supper? Did I see it in a magazine while sitting around in a waiting room?
When the only book available for citation was the Bible (you can substitute your Holy Book according to your creed here), then any “stolen” phrase was a) a sin of some sort and b) easily traced back to the page and verse. Now we come in contact with so many thoughts during the average day that anything we say afterward is subject to possible copyright infringement. If you have a sticky memory, then the risk is even higher.
I don’t want to go to jail for something said by Shakespeare (I know, he’s out of copyright, but the edition I read from probably isn’t). I don’t want to write THE SONG and then discover that I’ve lifted the lyrics from a crazed drunken listening session in some long ago university pub.
If a thousand monkeys can write a book, what chance do the rest of us have?
