Dizzy on Riffing, Siva on Sharing

T.S. Eliot said bad poets borrow, great poets steal. He should know.

Dizzy Gillespie said jazz musicians who copied Charlie Parker riffs couldn’t be thieves: “You can’t steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it, you can have it.” He should know, too.

The opportunity to quote Diz comes from last Thursday’s Open Source, which roamed the borderlands between artistic influence, plagiarism, sampling, and copyright infringement. The show began with novelist Jonathan Lethem, who published a provocatively plagiarized essay called “The Ecstasy of Influence” in Harper’s. Another voice in the conversation was Siva Vaidhyanathan, author Copyrights and Copywrongs, who blogs at Sivacracy. Two Siva quotes from the show:

[On open source culture] What we think of as open source is basically culture. It’s how human beings have organized themselves, communicated with each other, joined each other, forged identities, and most importantly, grooved and danced, for centuries. This is basically how people have always dealt with each other. It’s just in recent years we’ve imposed these interesting cages — legal cages, psychological cages, ethical cages — around this level of sharing.

[On copyright] Then we have, in the public discourse, a blending of anxieties about plagiarism and anxieties about copyright infringement, which are in fact two very different acts. Plagiarism is an ethical abrogation. It’s one in which you violate the norms of in interpretive community or a creative community, either a group of academics or scientists, or a group of poets or songwriters, and each of these communities has its own set of rules, as Jonathan [Lethem] explained. And when it comes right down to it, what we think of as plagiarism, the theft of ideas, is actually something that falls outside of copyright. Copyright does not protect ideas.