Since this list often gets into discussions about copyright I thought
I would recommend a recent article in Harpers by the novelist
Jonathan Lethem:
http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html
If you don't have time for the whole article, here are the final paragraphs:
"Artists and writers-and our advocates, our guilds and agents-too
often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to
these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the
tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our
privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of
their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy
function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more
than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our
lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic
counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with
artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other,
the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were
nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate
repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first
place.
As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy
day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to
be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the
Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured
usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The
name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories.
They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If
you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing."
-Randolph Peters
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