plagiarism - from pickpocketing to cut and paste

 

Everything converges in plagiarism. At least in the recent news. Plagiarism, to my mind, always makes for comedy – in that respect, it is like marriage, which traditionally falls at the end of comedy.  But the unlike minds, or like minds, that are yoked together in plagiarism struggle with quotation marks and intellectual property and fail the test of divorce and separtion, making for a mirror image of the marriage comedy. Plus, to me, quotation marks and IP - two of the golden themes of Derridian deconstruction, as a matter of fact - what is not to like in these tales?

Shakespeare, of course, had no pickpocket anxieties on this point. He could take North’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Anthony and see how the passages about Cleopatra were eminently boostable, and boost he did. This was the lay of the land for some time. No educated person in Shakespeare’s audience would be likely to miss the North reference, transformed and made more glorious by the sun of Shakespeare – to quote another Shakespeare character.

But textual institutions eventually were pulled by the notion of property. Adrian John’s go-to book, Piracy: the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates gives us a pretty lively history of the tangle between Protestantism, early liberalism, and property law that arose from one of those great opening moments: when, under William and Mary, and by the advise of John Locke, allowed the Press act, which required all written texts to be licenced by the Stationers, to lapse:

“It was not the first time this had happened, but the political circumstances were different now, and the law was destined never to be revived. John Locke, whose arguments played a major role in the Commons’ debates surrounding the act, repudiated it not only for imposing licensing—which he, like Milton, saw as a legacy of popery—but for fostering monopolies for both individual booksellers and the company at large. In rejecting the statute, Parliament therefore saw itself as upholding Protestant liberty and countering monopolies. But it made no alternative provision for the Stationers’ register itself. Suddenly the book trade found itself in a situation in which infringers of registered copies would face no legal sanction whatsoever. And at the same time it became legal to print and publish without being a member of the company at all. Internal regulation might have succeeded to keep booksellers and printers in line in the past, but now, in the speculative and entrepreneurial environment of 1690s London, it was never likely to prove sufficient. This was an environment in which new moral principles seemed to be advanced with every clutch of ambitious “projects”—and those projects soon pervaded the world of the book.”

These openings of the frontier – succeeded by rushes – are part and parcel of capitalism. And those who are most successful on exploiting this opening are likely to be the first to call for regulations, shaped to their own requirements.

For plagiarism to exist, one must have some standard idea of copying. Johns digs up the history of AI automata – which go back to the golden age of clockwork mechanisms. In particular, he describes one called the Microcosm – such a Silicon Valley-ish phrase! Yet this thing was built in the 17^th century by Harry Bridges. It was a complex of different machines:

“Built in the form of an ornate Roman Temple, in its fabric it contained musical automata, models of a carpenter’s workshop and landscapes with realistically moving figures, and accurate rotating mechanisms showing the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. It also boasted an orrery for the moons of Jupiter. It played music specially composed for its internal organ—or spectators could ask it to play their own. In all, it combined in one mechanism the principles of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and astronomy.”

To these principles were soon joined writing. All of these arts were under the possible sway of IP law, of course. Just as with our current new toy, ChatGPT, observers found the Microcosm a bit disturbing:

“The question became not the nature of original authorship, but the nature of copying. A machine this complex posed the question of what, exactly, the act of copying—of pirating—actually was.”

Ah, behold what a glorious legal thing the quotation mark is – I apply them and presto chango, instead of plagiarism I advance, on the great legal boardgame of life, to “fair use”!

Quotation marks, as we all know, falleth as the dew from heaven – and sometimes in the process of re-write they melt away. For underneath the words themselves are, supposedly, the ideas. Which the law must pursue as well – ideas, too, can be copied. Or can be generated concurrently. We all know the fierce academic battles – often taking on the hues of other social battles – that can arise from the claim that an idea is copied. In fact, it is hard to see how an idea could not, on some level, be anything but copied, since ideas need to breathe the communism of all that is mental and social in order to be. Yet we have, still, an idea of the original spirit, of inspiration, of genius, of all the old haunts, for say what you will, human life is unimaginable without haunting. And with haunting, exorcism.

It is an interesting thing, from the French perspective, that the whole idea of the dictée has dropped out of the American educational system (I know too little about the British one to comment). It is a puzzle to the Protestantized Yankee mind, such as mine, that the French teacher is  content to read, say, a passage in a Voltaire that the students are required to copy – as if literature were, after all, music and you need to play the scales. I think this tradition is petering out – although Adam, my boy, still does some dictée in his French classes, according to what he just told me. But copying is the one frowned upon, awful sin in the American curriculum. There’s a wonderful bit, in The Squid and The Whale, Noah Baumbach’s bittersweetbitter comedy, where the troubled teen son listens to Pink Floyd’s Hey You, copies the word and the tune, then presents the song as his own to his parents and eventually to a talent show, where he wins a prize – and then has to give it back when someone presumably younger than the fifty-ish judges points out where the song comes from.

This leads to the son – Walt – being remanded to therapy, where the therapist asks why he did it. He responds: “I felt I could've written it.”

“Therapist: So the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality. I see.”

Incidentally, to find that exchange, which I remembered from the movie, I went to google, found the script of The Squid and the Whale, and cut and pasted. We have the instruments to destroy our institutions of intellectual property at the heart of the machines that are ‘protected’ by our intellectual property laws. Walt not only copies the song and performs it, but he has recorded it on a tape recorder and learned it by stopping the tape, and rewinding it – copying a perhaps illegal copy.

Everything converges in plagiarism.