On the trademark side, people try to register phrases such as "fair and balanced" or protect a single word, such as "Spike." Marvel and DC Comics may sue you if you misuse the word "superhero," which they -- yes -- trademarked in 1979.
These days, if you're a Hollywood filmmaker and you shoot a passionate love scene in an art gallery and pan past a sculptural assemblage of tuna cans, you'd better get the permission of the artist, and probably StarKist (sorry, make that StarKist®) as well. Big studios employ whole teams to make sure such accidents don't happen.
Meanwhile, journalists hunger to find derived language in the work of budding novelists. Scandal websites expose lifted phrases in the work of journalists. Computers search pop music for recycled phrases. And people who write little-known books sue when their ideas enter the culture in more popular books.
Also out on the playing field, one now finds anti-copyright activists, who launch legal broadsides, conferences, articles in Wired magazine and open-source software. They worry that, thanks to aggressive lawyers, copyright is being used less and less to \o7encourage\f7 creative work and more and more as a means to \o7discourage\f7 it. They oppose the unlimited expansion of copyright protection with a freewheeling concept called "copyleft," and they argue for a different kind of intellectual progress, the kind represented by efforts similar to those in my planned book: in essence, the right, even the \o7responsibility\f7 to copy.
"... We have to recognize that people who are not powerful should have the right to play with the cultural signs around them," says activist Siva Vaidhyanathan in a published interview. "We shouldn't lock up expressions, symbols and information and assign [them] to corporations and governments without a full and fair examination and justification."
It's an old-fashioned idea.
Creativity unleashed
Once upon a time, originality of any kind was considered more a vice than a virtue -- and certainly no way to start a dynasty. No one cared if medieval frescoes reflected one another like mirrors, and gargoyles on cathedrals looked about the same. The gargoyle makers never showed up with their attorneys, and critics didn't wail when Chaucer stole nearly all his tales. Certainly no one paused to wonder if he would be sued when he heard a snatch of music and copied it out for his friends ... by whatever means available.
