http://cheaptalk.org/2012/05/31/thomas-pynchon-on-plagiarism/ A blog about economics, politics and the random interests of forty-something professors Thu, 23 May 2013 17:13:07 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://cheaptalk.org/2012/05/31/thomas-pynchon-on-plagiarism/#comment-14081 Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:10:38 +0000 http://cheaptalk.org/?p=11542#comment-14081 very much agreed

]]> http://cheaptalk.org/2012/05/31/thomas-pynchon-on-plagiarism/#comment-14078 Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:46:10 +0000 http://cheaptalk.org/?p=11542#comment-14078 Isn’t the the problem of plagiarism “reciprocal in nature”, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Coase’s paper “The problem of social cost”. That is, we may divide the world into “copiers” and “creators”. Ordinarily, people simply assume that “copiers” are “bad” and “creators” “good” — but this assumption rests on the premise that creators should have a property right or legal entitlement to their creations. While this rule makes sense in most cases (as a way of promoting creation and discouraging copying), there are many situations in which there is no ex ante right to one’s creations (e.g., tattoo designs or “body art”, fashion designs, etc.) — so, this is one way of looking at Pynchon’s apology of plagiarism: instead of saying that copying is inherent to the artistic process (it is, but so is creation), it would be better to say that there are situations where we want to exempt copying (or, in some cases, even reward copying) from the property rights of creators in order to foster more creation, in total and at the margin

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