When I was six or eight years old³ I invented the word crud⁴. Or at least I thought I had. It came out of my mouth on the playground one morning as a way of avoiding saying the word⁵ crap, a word that seems to reside in the murky borders of profanity, one whose status as a swear word I was not quite sure of at the time. When I came across the word in a Garfield⁵

When I was in seventh or ninth grade, my brother had to invent something for school, so I suggested to him that he glue a Ziploc ™ ⁶ liner to the inside of a potato chip bag. This was long before pre-packaged foods employed of any sort featured re-sealable bags. His teacher, Mrs. Neal⁷, thought it was such a good idea that she sent it to Charles Chips™, who sent a response praising the idea, which proved impractical for potato chip bags as the metal bags are heat-sealed and would make a melted mess of plastic at the top. They did send an enormous (refrigerator-sized) box of fresh, delicious Charles Chips, though. When I started seeing Ziploc seals on everything but potato chip bags years later, I felt a sense of deja vu, only this time I only felt robbed. It was, however, probably just as delusional, as whatever fine people possess that top-secret Ziploc™ technology would probably have rights to the idea. But I might have gotten a giant box of Ziploc bags as a consolation prize.

I have an embarrassing story regarding what our fair president⁸ would call a "youthful indiscretion" that involves coming home after two many drinks and reversing the functions of the laundry hamper and the toilet. Months later, a friend who shall remain nameless told that story as though it had happened to him. I would have brushed it off as a coincidence--or perhaps an occurrence more common than the rest of you lushes might care to admit--if he hadn't accused meof stealing it from him. He also passed off an observation that I had made after weeks of research--that most car horns play an F. ⁹ I'm not going to name this person here since he's one of my best friends and greatest people I know. ¹⁰

I have a joke¹¹ that I've told so many times that I've come to think of it as my own, but of course I didn't make it up. I still felt the same feeling--this time more pride than indignation--when my friend Imad stole the punch line in his book, I Dream of Microwaves. I do get credit in the acknowledgements, after all--both for that and for helping him move or something.

The following web address is taken: www.nicholasfrench.com¹¹.

I wrote program notes for a production of The Laramie Project that were swiped almost wholesale in a review in The Beloit Daily News¹². Now I use the review in class as an example of plagiarism, so hundreds of students know that Michael Chase is a fraud and a thief and a bad plagiarist. ¹³

My students often marvel at the nonchalant way I address being plagiarized, as if I should be more upset that some hack thought that my phrasing was good enough to claim as his own. I know enough now that copyright laws regarding promotional materials are slippery enough that I probably wouldn't have too much legal claim anyway. I know that I wrote it first.

But more than that, I recognize the absurdity of laying claim to an idea, or an image, or a word. I've read about the lawsuit over which entertainment company owned the rights to the letter X¹⁴. I've attended both of the schools involved in a lawsuit over which one owned the rights to Ohio. I've done the math to determine how many different ways the same old I-IV-V chord progression can be arranged¹⁵, but I can't count the number of times the same old progression has sounded brand new to me.

The idea that there is nothing new to say isn't even a new one, and even pointing that out is a cliche¹⁶. I've taken enough English classes to see that every story can be reduced to one of three or six or eight or thirty-seven patterns (my favorite scheme is Eliot's--birth, copulation, death (not necessarily in that order). ¹⁷

A little stealing is almost certainly inevitable, and more than likely beneficial. Language is the greatest gift we've received from our ancestors and will be our greatest legacy. To deprive the world of a word or phrase seems hubristic and selfish. As I understand it, what makes science science is that its findings are shared¹⁸. Without that collaboration, there can be no progress, something Newton knew well: "If I have seen farther than other men, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

Copyright law makes a distinction, of course, between the expression of an idea and the idea itself. But the distinction seems much murkier than our laws allow. If some asshole is allowed to copyright the word Caution for the use in blandly amusing T-Shirts¹⁹, then the rest of us are stuck using synonyms if we decide to make our own stupid shirts. And once someone has laid claim to Careful and Achtung!, then what’s left? There are only so many ways of telling someone to watch the fuck out.

If the finite nature of ideas and the more finite number of expressions aren’t enough to suggest that our ways of thinking about copyright haven’t gone to far, then consider how artists address the fact that everything has been said or done. “Make it new,” was Ezra Pound’s motto, and the artists of that period knew better than anyone that the old can be made new again²⁰. While there seem to be protections in place for parody and collage, copyright has delivered an irrecoverable blow to the limits of artistic license and possibility. One case in point would be hip-hop music, which because of an avarice-based approach to intellectual property (arguably) reached a creative heyday in the late 80s and early 90s. For an upstart to create a collage of appropriated sounds to the effect of, say, De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising or The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique²¹, without forking over copious amounts of cash to those who would probably lay claim to the 4/4 time signature and the C-scale if they could. Now, instead we get Puff Daddy, who has the money to sample all of the music he wants, lacking only the necessary taste and talent to do anything remotely interesting with them.

Where did these ideas about intellectual property even come from? I doubt the founding fathers would have thought to much of the idea. If they did, we'd still be paying royalties to John Locke's family for stealing whatever ideas we do have about property. ²²

Every development, every idea, every work of art necessarily borrows from what comes before it, so I can't get too upset when an old friend calls out of the blue and asks whether he can copyright an arrangement he had composed for a song I had written eight years ago, especially since I barely recognize his version as my own. You bet I copyrighted that song (even if it was only a poor man's copyright at the time), so flip that form over Joe and fill out the back under derivative work. I also can't get too upset knowing that I copped the basic chord progression and bits of the melody from the Stones' "Honky Tonk Women." The sentiment of the song you might think is swiped from the beats, but they stole it from Henry Miller who stole it from Whitman and Rimbaud. I stole a bit from those two dudes myself²³.

I get more upset when I get emails stating that some of the shirt designs I had posted on cafe press may be in violation of copyright. Either the word quixotic is copyrighted or the scrabble-type font on which it was displayed is, so my very dorky joke about the secondmost valuable Scrabble word²⁴ will not be printed on sweatshop cotton, alas. There also may be a problem with the I Rock U-Rock shirts, even though U-Rock is only the unofficial nickname of the school-who-shall-not-be-named-for-fear-of-lawsuit²⁶, one that it works hard to disassociate itself from. Whether that makes that shirt more or less of a problem for me is hard to say. The fact that I have sold a quantity of zero helps. ²⁷

I don't get upset at the people who kindly notify my that I might be in violation of copyright. I get upset that the concept even exists. I think there's a way to give credit for ideas without hindering the free exchange of them. I remember reading that that was an essential component of a free society somewhere. ²⁸

You may notice, however, that I have removed the lyrics that I posted a while back. According to the old myspace terms of service, it used to be that you essentially waived your copyright to Rupert Murdoch by posting it on myspace, and I thought if someone was going to own that stuff, it would be me. Evidently, however, Billy Bragg convinced myspace to rewrite their policy, so now we serfs get to keep our work.

My next step is to copyright some of my ideas: the movie about a building (or a planet) that’s about to blow up and only one guy can’t stop it; the one about the young punk with talent and attitude who’s the best at something but under his tough exterior he’s been wounded by a parent with high expectations (Hey Tom Cruise, are you busy? No? Great!). The song about still being in love with someone who doesn’t love you anymore is mine too, and the book about human beings in relationship with one another. I’m buying the vowels a, e, and o, and I’m not sharing. I’m taking my ball and going home.

In short, this has all been said before, but this has all been said before.
< br>

1. This line I pilfered from the cover of one of the Fall's albums.
2. Le Comte de Lautreamont wrote a surreal and evil book called Maldoror and promptly died. The way the book employs pastiche, borrowing liberally from a broad range of sources, demonstrates better than perhaps any work of literature that a little stealing can be creative.
3. I'm not sure how old I was, but I say six or eight because Carl, Billy Bob Thornton's character in Sling Blade had a fondness for this phrase, just as I have a fondness for that character. I like the way he talks. He likes the way I talk. Mmm Hmmm.
4. Shakespearean scholars call this technique "dodging the curse."
5. Ziploc
6. Bush
24. It's to be expected that Billy Bragg would be fighting for the little guy, the commie. It's also fitting that he should have been the one chosen to arrange those unfinished Woody Guthrie songs, as Woody was someone with something to say about ownership. Supposedly he was content to let his music belong to the public.
25. Buying vowels on Wheel of Fortuneis generally bad strategy, especially early in the round. Not only does it cost you precious semolians, but it is also usually rather unnecessary. Keep in mind how easy it is to piece together the words and phrases on cutesy personalized plates that omit all of the vowels.
26. University of Wisconsin-Rock County
28. Free Society

Copyright© 2007,  Nicholas Parnell French
homeward / about / archives / linkage / contact / academia / synaesthesia / nonsense / etcetera / miscellany