"Something Borrowed", an article by Malcolm Gladwell, published in the New Yorker, is intriguing because he relates creativity and plagiarism. Where do the ideas and words we use come from? Can we track their provenance?
Playwright Bryony Lavery in her Broadway play, "Frozen", plagiarised a profile Gladwell wrote.
Gladwell concludes by being generous to Lavery, and writes:
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Creative property, Lessig reminds us, has many lives-the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going. The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer's words have a virgin birth and an eternal life. I suppose that I could get upset about what happened to my words. I could also simply acknowledge that I had a good, long ride with that line-and let it go.
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