Just whose idea is it anyway?

"The word 'author' does derive from the word 'authority,' " notes Nimmer, "and once upon a time, every Joe with a quill and parchment did not try to write. Once upon a time, few even ventured an opinion unless it repeated the authoritative ideas of his masters. Not only was a man like Homer a collector of past traditions as opposed to an innovator," Nimmer says over dessert, "but the same sensibility lasted for many centuries. Shakespeare was \o7expected\f7 to plagiarize."

Only somewhere between the Renaissance and the Romantic era did our notion of the artist as an "autonomous creative genius" arise, and this potent idea helped inspire the English Copyright Act of 1709. It was an important advance in civilization, paving the way for people not only to earn a proper living from creative endeavors but to build whole industries on creative work.

You can trace Hollywood, along with our new Age of Copyright, directly to the days of Beethoven, Shelley and Keats. And every day, quite sensible copyrights are established by people conjuring up, say, detectives for detective novel franchises. Under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, you don't even have to register your character: Just by putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard, you may own the next Inspector Clouseau. If you do it first, you become the Author with a capital A.

Still, our romantic obsession with authorship has continued to inflate until every redactor, ripper, rapper and blogger now can claim to be creating protectable "original work" even while being threatened by suits from those whose work they may be cutting and pasting.

This leads to the strangest paradox: As Vaidhyanathan notes on his website, "We have generated a situation in which it's harder than ever to make legitimate use of information technology and copyrighted products and easier than ever to make illegitimate use of cultural products."

Errant, and easy, disregard

While chatting with Nimmer, I realize that most of us have probably violated the 1976 Act or the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act every day of our lives -- and never mind the stuff you photocopy for friends, the photos you clip from Web galleries or the many blogs you quote in your\o7 \f7blog. No, the law gets way more picky than that.

Did you know, for example, that if your friend Jasmine sends you a private e-mail with an original coinage, let's say, "Our fortunes are blessed with undeserved coincidence," and you use that in your new investor PowerPoint show, you have technically violated her copyright?