People are so insecure and neurotic about their ‘material.’ It’s not your material. You got it from a thousand places, the person who uses it is going to take it in a thousand directions. Everyone should just chill out. I thought that Jonah Lehrer was sloppy and made mistakes and all that, but the real question is: Did you read his books and learn something from it? If you did, who cares whether the Dylan quote had that precise wording or had a slightly different wording? I don’t know, I just don’t have the strength and patience for these kinds of intramural arguments that writers have about whether this precise use of words matched this precise use of words. I’d just much rather answer the question of whether something is being learned, or something interesting is happening.
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The attitude of which he speaks is as American as the dollar bill. In this age of copyright extremism, any hint of copying is seen as lost revenue by the original artist. This despite the fact that all art, and culture in general, is derivative. Copyright maximalists often say that without copyright, there is no incentive to create new works. This is patently false, and in fact the opposite may be true: if you you can’t create new work without somehow removing any and all references to earlier work – no matter how tenuous – why bother?