In reading some of the material given to us, I found a bit of interest in the idea of copyright- especially in Lenthem's "The ecstasy of influence." We all know about copyright, especially about people getting sued by things like the music industry for breaking copyright laws. But is copyright, well... right?
Of course we should have some sort of copyright law- without it, plagiarism would just become a part of life. But it may be a little bit too strict right now. Igor Stravinsky believed that "a good composer does not imitate, he steals"- this says something about what musicians have been doing throughout history. Someone will write a cool sounding line, someone else will think that it was awesome, and use it in their piece, etc. And how often do novelists and philosophers reference each other (directly or indirectly)? Think about how many books allude to something else. Isn't allusion basically just stealing? If Hesiod got his Theogeny copyrighted now, I'm sure a lot of people would be in a good bit of trouble for using names and events from it without quoting it.
We just really need to tone down this whole copyright debate. Did you know that the owners of Limewire are supposed to pay the music industry $75 billion? That's like... 4 times the national debt. Ridiculous.
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