"Are not all literary works, in a sense, derived?" he asks after quizzing me about my methods. "Ideas, of course, cannot be copyrighted, only the tangible presentation of those ideas. You just need to present them in a new way."
Already, I'm figuring how I will reorder successions of thought and invert graphs of data. My efforts may not be quite as good as the original, but I swear the result will demonstrate originality. More important, if I do manage to create something new, I will own a little piece of the future -- in fact, more and more of the future, thanks to Congress, which keeps extending intellectual property rights and establishing new intellectual dynasties.
The latest extension, accomplished thanks to lobbying by folks including Disney, will allow my heirs to own my words, images or music for 70 years after I die, so together we could easily hold onto something for a century, and some unborn grandchild could join that rapidly growing class of aristocracy known as the "copyright heir."
Cold, hard copyrighted cash
Not everyone seems to have noticed, but it's clear we recently zipped past the "information economy" and straight into the "copyright economy." It's no longer about access to information -- everyone has access. Now it's about ownership of the characters, stories, tunes, trademarks, software and other ephemera of our daily lives. If serfdom returns to L.A., we won't end up as peons working on other people's landed estates -- no, the great dynasties of the future may be built on cartoon characters.
Not surprisingly, thanks to this little shift in the economy, a new sport has arisen in the land. It's called "extreme copyright," and the people who play this game are the ones who have me worried.
In extreme copyright, you try to push the limits of what intellectual property can be owned and controlled -- or you try to penalize those who seem to have pushed the envelope a little too far. For example, not long ago, the family of Martin Luther King Jr. took CBS to court when the network used a tape it had made of King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech in a documentary (the family prevailed). And a government-authorized publisher tried to copyright official court opinions by arguing that it had introduced "original pagination" to the otherwise completely public documents -- which must be cited every day by judges and lawyers.
