Those who are fed up with the romantic cult of individual genius and the increasing tendency to demand payment for even short quotations of copyrighted material would have us believe there’s no such thing as plagiarism. Last week at the Art Institute they had their say.
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The panel discussion, held under the auspices of the Chicago Humanities Festival and the University of Chicago’s Franke Institute for the Humanities, was moderated by former New Yorker staff writer (and current CHF artistic director) Lawrence Weschler and headlined by novelist Jonathan Lethem and Judge Richard Posner. The argument against plagiarism’s existence, made by everyone but Posner, went by example: Shakespeare stole the plot of Romeo and Juliet. He lifted almost every word in his superb description of Cleopatra from a translation of Plutarch. Classical music depends on allusion that’s akin to sampling. And who would hang the dreaded scarlet P on Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol? “As if there was anything in human utterance that isn’t plagiarism,” Weschler asserted in his introduction, and at the evening’s conclusion, University of Chicago professor of comparative literature Francoise Meltzer reiterated the point. “Everything is cumulative,” she said. “The originality myth has come to a close.”
In other words, copyright infringement is a property offense that harms the person plagiarized, whereas plagiarism may also harm the plagiarizer’s customers, competitors, and the general public. Those who infringe copyright may end up defending themselves in court; those who plagiarize end up in the court of public opinion, which is comparatively merciless and knows no statute of limitations. Nearly 20 years have passed since Joe Biden appropriated part of a speech by British pol Neal Kinnock during a presidential campaign, but the public has neither forgiven nor forgotten. Nor, arguably, should it.
That was too much for Posner. Bear in mind that he’s often thought of as a pragmatist and a relativizer, someone who regularly dissolves legal absolutes like civil liberties in the acid of economic trade-offs. But in this company, the judge’s soft, high-pitched voice and wicked deadpan seemed like reason itself. “Now you’re abolishing any kind of plagiarism at all,” he said to Lethem. “What would you regard as a genuine case of plagiarism?”
