Anil Dash’s “It was news” pointed me to Malcolm Gladwell’s long narrative about plagiarism, intellectual property, and derivatives in The New Yorker. It’s quite worth your read, but at 6500+ words, it’ll take some time!

I was struck by this near to Gladwell’s conclusion:

Creative property … has many lives—the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going. The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life.

My friend Derek Webb is a fan of Wilco, and one can certainly hear influences from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and a ghost is born in his latest album, I See Things Upside Down. But Webb, in his show, has chosen to cover a song by Woody Guthrie—”The Blood of the Lamb”—in the spirit of “getting to know the influences of those who’ve influenced me”. What a great confluence.