Or if she posts an ad for a Grecian urn on EBay, and you paste her language into your own ad for your own antiquity, she might reasonably sue you (as long as she did not, in fact, copy her lingo from the poem by Keats).
But if you are breakfasting with said Jasmine and, under the undue influence of a double cappuccino, she discusses the concept for a new miniseries about the LAPD ("White & Black & Blue") that she has \o7not yet written down, \f7you should feel free to use her plot with impunity ... friendship be damned. (Although you should be careful about using that "WBB" title; I'm pretty sure I heard it somewhere before.)
Some of these mysteries transcend the legal: Can one accidentally become an author? In a time of postmodern art, do our doodles deserve copyright? Our spilled milk? Certainly each spill is "original."
Over lunch, I tell David that when I browse the Web, I picture a vast, exploding ball of copyrightable stuff -- important, unimportant and downright meaningless -- expanding like the big bang itself into the cosmos and leaving less and less room for, well, originality. (Or did David make that observation, and I'm merely repeating his words? In any case, I'm the first to get it down.)
Pushing aside his plate, my friend smoothes a proverbial napkin and draws a pyramid representing all the varieties of written works covered in the Copyright Act of 1976. At the top he writes "Celebrated," meaning works by celebrated authors. Beneath this he writes "Quality Works," then "Mediocre, but Finished Products." Below these he writes "Catalogs, Billboards, Instruction Sheets, Packaging Labels, Etc."
And he quotes one of his own more obscure papers: "Down here near the bottom of the pyramid," he says, "fall such matters as a 'Memorandum to All Personnel Regarding Procedures to Be Followed During Friday's Fire Drill'; an Internet posting seeking information from fellow denizens of the Britney Spears website; the sign posted on the telephone pole describing and seeking the return of a lost cat; and countless other such ephemera. On reflection, you realize this category inevitably comprises even more items than all the rest of the pyramid combined" -- and yes, all of them are subject to copyright.
"At this point," he continues, deadpan, "one is tempted to conclude that we have reached the end of the copyright line. But that conclusion would be entirely erroneous." At the base of the pyramid he now writes, "Doodles, marginalia, kid drawings, and etc."
