By: Jim Taylor

If ancient Rome had intellectual property laws, we wouldn't have the Christmas story to read and tell at this time of year.
          Back then, anything released to an audience instantly became common property.
          The Christmas stories were no exception. Matthew wrote about the Magi. Luke wrote about angels and shepherds. John wrote a prose poem: "In the beginning."
          Those stories were copied and re-copied by countless people. Until the centralized technology of printing enabled authors to control who could publish their material.
          Today, the Internet has returned us to those pre-printing-press days. But the supposed owners of "intellectual property" are fighting tooth and nail to retain power.
          Intellectual property assumes that someone -- some person, some corporation -- can actually own an idea and/or its expression.
So pharmaceutical giant Novartis has initiated legal action to prevent India from manufacturing generic retroviral drugs that could mean life to millions of poverty-stricken HIV/AIDS sufferers in Africa and Asia.
          Novartis believes that protecting its patent -- and, of course, profits for investors -- matter more than six million lives.
          Monsanto uses similar arguments to force farmers to buy genetically modified seed.

UNENFORCEABLE LAWS
          I find myself on both sides of this argument.
          On the one hand, I'm a writer. I depend on copyright law to get paid for the words I write.
          On the other hand, I believe that the Internet -- electronic digital storage and transmission -- has made copyright law unenforceable.
          Once an idea is turned loose today, the originator loses control over it. It cannot be recalled. It cannot be erased from some central repository. Every download, every e-mail, creates countless electronic copies.
Canada plans to revise its copyright laws. A few voices suggest that the proposed changes may merely complicate copyright problems.
          Theoretically, everything published in Canada must be filed with the National Library in Ottawa. Every book, magazine, and newspaper. Every LP, tape, and CD. Also every blog, e-zine, every piece of spam.
Because they're all forms of publication.
          Boggles the mind, doesn't it?
          The real database is no longer the National Library, or the Library of Congress in Washington. It is the Internet itself.
          In this anarchic new world, it is all too easy to cut-and-paste one person's thoughts into another's product.

THE PERILS OF PLAGIARISM
          Last spring, 17-year-old Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan signed a $500,000 contract with Little Brown publishers for her first novel. The book reached 32 on the New York Times fiction list. Then the publisher recalled it when evidence mounted that Viswanathan had lifted large chunks from other "chick-lit" authors. Especially from Megan McCafferty.
McCafferty said that reading Viswanathan's book was like "recognizing your own child's face. My own words were just leaping out at me page after page after page."
McCafferty's publisher, Random House, documented more than 40 examples of "identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure" in what it called "literary identity theft."
          I sympathize, having been a victim of literary theft myself.
          On one occasion, I ran across a piece in a church's national magazine. I liked its message. I liked its style. I should. When I checked, I found I had written it myself, ten years earlier.
          Someone had copied a favourite selection from one of my books and forwarded it to friends overseas, who passed it around until no one knew its origins any more -- the same thing that happened to early Christian writings.
          Finally, one of those persons published my words as their own.
          I suppose I shouldn't complain. Shakespeare borrowed most of his plots from previous writers. James Joyce swiped Ulysses from Homer. Brahms wrote variations on themes by Haydn and Paganini.
          More recently, Raytheon CEO William H. Swanson apparently plagiarized most of the book, Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management, that made him famous as a management guru. According to the New York Times, 17 of his 33 rules came from a 1944 book by W. J. King, The Unwritten Laws of Engineering. Four more came from a collection of maxims by Donald Rumsfeld in the Wall Street Journal.

STANDING ON ANCESTORS' SHOULDERS
Those acts were all traceable, because they occurred in print.
          Electronic publishing makes tracing more difficult. Early hip-hop music frequently used pre-recorded audio loops from other artists. A landmark 2005 case -- Bridgeport Music vs Dimension Films -- centred on a sequence of just three notes.
          As Will Payne noted in Harvard's Crimson journal, "From this perspective, almost every creative work could be found 'derivative' by clever lawyers."
          A letter to Crimson's editor called it "the increasing privatization of our common culture."
          "No creative work, whether scientific or literary," the writer continued, "is the exclusive product of any single individual, or even of a large group of individuals, such as a corporation. All such works build on a tradition. created by innumerable people, from which they draw ideas, facts, words, and expressions. It is in the nature of culture for people to make use of elements of previous work in composing new ones."
          Electronic technology has, I submit, turned this tradition into common practice.

CONCEPTS OF PROPERTY
          The problem is not the practice. Rather, the problem itself draws attention to our culture's elevation of property rights to near godlike status. It has become unthinkable to question the right of a drug company to own a process, a chemical corporation to own a genetic sequence, a sculptor to own a shape, a composer to own certain frequencies.
          Tinkering with copyright legislation based on previous technology will not resolve the problem.
          We need to re-think our whole understanding of property. Some men still think of women as property; some employers think they own their employees. Landowners rebel against zoning restrictions.
          Once we recognize that some things cannot be owned, we might be able to deal more intelligently with the notion of intellectual property.
          The messenger does not own the message. Remember that, as you listen once again to the familiar Christmas stories.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.