Basically, I’m just going to restate and agree in this blog with what Lathem said in his article The Exctasy of Influence: A Plagiarism. Everything has been said or seen before, or the foundation of what is being said or created has been laid down by previous artist and innovators. Lathem makes a strong case for his argument by giving examples of all the works that seem to mimic each other; he states,
then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism (harpers.org 2012).
We do want more plagiarism. This list is a short list of “plagiarism” that has occurred over history. If we wanted to, we could start even earlier, with the story of Gilgamesh and the similarities found within Noah’s Ark in the Bible. However, people tend to forget about the history of borrowed ideas.
Without borrowing ideas, where would humanity be today? Who knows. Everything that we see today has evolved from previous ideas to create original pieces similar to building blocks or Lego’s used by children to create some form of structure or figure.
Lathem’s words ring true when he wrote about art and language, stating,
The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.
Who owns language? No one, but everyone. And we all contribute to language in our own original ways. This contribution is a “necessity”, as Lathem states; a necessity in a sense of the progression of the arts, but also for the progression of humanity as a whole. Language, stories, and the arts are the foundation of communication; you take them away under copyright law, and humanity will have great trouble coexisting. What would have happened if countries had copy-written their languages and banded its use outside of their boundaries? I know this is a far stretch, but think of it on micro level, and we began see the vast contributions that people can make by using the existing ideas of others by manipulating and advancing them. Maybe, without Ovid, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet could not have existed. Maybe without Einstein’s E=MC2, we could have never made it to the moon.
I agree with Lathem that certain copyrights do have to exist in order for people like him to make a living from their contributions and what they love to. Give the living acknowledgement and their fair pay for their borrowed-unique gift to the world, and allow their posterity to benefit from the authors work. However, don’t stop the progression of art by not allowing ideas and art to flow naturally as they have throughout human history.
Bibilography
The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, By Jonathan Lethem (Harper’s Magazine).” Harper’s Magazine. Web. 13 Jan. 2012. <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387>.
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