Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 17th, '07

[Mazer]

Originally Posted by JackSpratts

The Ecstasy of Influence

A plagiarism
Jonathan Lethem

A great read, and a finer argument than I've ever before witnessed or made myself. Thanks for posting it, Jack.

[JackSpratts]

Originally Posted by Mazer

A great read, and a finer argument than I've ever before witnessed or made myself. Thanks for posting it, Jack.

I’m glad you liked it.

Yes, it’s a remarkable, forceful work, one of the top two or three arguments for limiting the scope of copyright law to have ever appeared in the Week in Review, a space that regularly sees its share of great advocacy pieces. This was made more so as the author openly states at the start because it is itself an act of plagiarism, with small passages deliberately ripped from previous texts and artfully massaged into a whole.

''This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I 'wrote' (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.''

Lethem’s ''keys'' can be found at the end of his essay as originally posted on Harper’s website, itself another great space to explore.

I’ve said it before; there is nothing original except the mixing - and grasping content creators and their distributors would do well to understand this once and for all.

- js.

[Mazer]

In other words, there is nothing new under the sun.

Funny how such truisms may be mentioned and still be disbelieved even after thousands of years.