Theft

This is a very short book about copying. Its contents, unless otherwise noted, are licensed under CC-BY SA 4.0 (more on that in a bit). You can download, copy, remix, excerpt, change, and repost it however you see fit.

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way.

[Frederick] Taylor’s model of workplace productivity depended entirely on deskilling, on the invention of unskilled labor—which, heretofore, had not existed. More than half a century later, long after Taylor died while gripping a watch, Peter Drucker would pick up the baton he left behind and intone about the arrival of “knowledge workers.” But his definition of this new class of workers existed entirely in opposition to Taylor’s stories of their supposedly unknowledgeable peers.

...In other words, Drucker’s now-infamous formulation of knowledge workers only makes sense if you accept the premise that other workers do not themselves truck with knowledge. But that premise was the product of theft—an outcome of Taylor’s extraction rather than a natural or immutable fact of the work.

...Perhaps it’s even better to acknowledge that there never were any knowledge workers. There have only ever been workers.

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about intellectual property and the underlying moral and legal issues. In blogging and tweeting about these thoughts, I’ve tended to use the word “borrow”, but at times I’ve used the word “steal” to assert the implicit moral judgment.

...In dancing around the moral and semantic differences between borrowing and stealing, I’ve been missing the greater point. Elliot used the word steal, not for its immoral connotation, but to suggest ownership. To steal something is to take possession of it.

When you steal an idea and have the time and good taste to make it your own, it grows into something different, hopefully something greater. But as you borrow more and more from other products, there’s less and less of you in the result. Less to be proud of, less to own.