It may be hard to imagine a lawsuit arising from your child's drawing of a UFO, now posted on your refrigerator, but under the 1976 law (otherwise apparently known as the Nimmer Full Employment Act), it might be possible:
"Your honor, this is a highly original conception of a UFO."
Indeed, the U.S. Congress once discussed the potential copyright liability of a janitor cleaning up after a kindergarten class.
Unlike most of us, the law takes no interest in where a work falls on the pyramid -- whether high or low -- although Nimmer argues that the law should be amended at least to require the intention of creating a new work. According to the heir and copyright owner of "Nimmer on Copyright," you shouldn't have to worry about copying someone's spilled milk, unless you're spilling it on purpose to plagiarize an abstract expressionist from the 1950s.
Sagging under its own weight
At last I ask my friend if the vast proliferation of copyrightable material, along with the extreme ease of creating, destroying and copying it, doesn't bring a kind of absurdity to the whole system -- an "Alice in Wonderland" factor that threatens the whole notion of copyright in the long run. I mean, now that blogs copy blogs endlessly, and all of us cut and paste our way through our daily lives, doesn't the law of supply and demand begin to operate? Won't the modern glut of authorship eventually cheapen the name "author" and all creative work?
He has no answer to this question, but it does seem to have brought us back around to my book.
"Right now, my friend," he says, "you feel guilty for repeating the ideas of others, but that's only because you're influenced by that Romantic idea of individual genius and protected, 'original art.' Even if you do not contribute a single new idea to your field, it will be your idea to bring together all these other ideas. And the presentation of the whole will be copyrightable as an original work. That will be your contribution to civilization. At first blush, I'd say your technique as a redactor is not only ethical but right in the historical mainstream."
"You mean," I say, "it may be Homeric?"
David lifts his eyebrows with a hint of irony, but I convince myself he must be right. He is, after all, an expert. In any case, as I gulp the last of my coffee and pay the bill, I resolve that once my book is published, I shall proudly wear that new title of "author."
