Vindication: "Plagiarism is BS" Edition
People who support my work often pay close attention to how things I have critiqued play out. They send me interesting little tidbits, and I wanted to share some that support two things:
“Plagiarism and You” has been a vehicle to (besides harassing James Somerton) defend intellectual property law, which people have claimed to be against the whole time.
Many people are seeing just how BS the whole thing is, including people who have previously been quite critical of me.
Firstly, a controversy happened in the UK regarding someone who took a photograph and got mad that a painter… hand-painted it. The idea this is plagiarism is absurd, and this renders basically all classical art “plagiarism,” as much of it is artists repainting other works.
However, a court in the UK ruled in favor of the photographer because (surprise, surprise) their fair use laws are stupid (this would not have happened if the case had been in the US). And our man Harry Brewis liked all the tweets about it.
Most telling is this tweet, which makes it clear that the point is that intellectual property law is good and must be exercised to stop the “fake artists” - as many like to say, it’s mask off:
Here’s the thing: I agree with this person that missing out on compensation is bad. However, the solution is not intellectual property law, a form of enclosure ultimately used to take possession of something to collect rent on it. If we were operating on different sets of incentives and rewards, where the labor was rewarded rather than the commodity, this would be an easy situation to handle: you get compensated for doing the work.
I have repeatedly presented this argument, and I think it is the correct one. I have been saying this since Hbomb released Plagiarism and You(Tube), and people have slowly but surely been shaken loose. This whole plagiarism farce is beginning to look like what it is: an ideological defense of bourgeois property dynamics.
Though it isn’t all the same (Marxist) critique I am making, I take it as a sign of consciousness that it’s being pushed back on at all:
Perhaps my favorite response was from someone who had previously been critical of me, though:
I, of course, responded to them that they were not only correct but spitting straight fire. This is the correct line, regardless of this video they uploaded a while back:
This softened them on me lol
This is to say not only are people getting it, but it’s something that is so self-evidently true it can make people see through ideological crap they’ve heard about me, and if you are familiar with me, you know that can be pretty hard for people to do.
I waited a few days, but I wanted to share this as a positive move on this front. Although the court ruling is unfortunate, people are sticking their necks out on this issue, which should be commended. For more information on the problems involving this, watch my doc, Plato is a Bitch: AI and Bomberguy.
Criticism of value-generating property (intellectual or otherwise) dynamics is one of the big arguments we need to make for class consciousness, and it seems pretty effective in terms of getting people on board. I am going to have to say this is a good idea to talk about more.
How, exactly, I don’t know. But we’ll deal with that as it comes.
-P
speaking of plagiarism, a song just came up on Spotify that i absolutely thought was Elastica’s 90s hit, Connection. a few bars in i thought, “never heard that bassline.” turns out it’s a song called Three Girl Rhumba by band called Wire.
i was telling my husband that i remember an Elastica interview where they said the band’s concept was to revisit 80s-style stuff. turns out they were re-working riffs and arrangements from other British ‘art punk’ bands (including another band, The Stranglers) of that era who they were in the scene with—shared studio space.
telling my husband all this and he looks up Elastica’s wiki page and finds that their PUBLISHERS all got into a fight which was unwelcomed by the bands. here’s what Stranglers’ bassist JJ Burnel had to say: "Yes, it sounds like us, but so what? Of course there's plagiarism, but unless you live in a vacuum there's always going to be.”
and this is my fav part, he says, “It's the first thing our publishers have done for us in 20 years, but if it had been up to me, I wouldn't have bothered." 💀 Another member of The Stranglers, Jet Black, even thanked Elastica in Melody Maker for bringing attention to his old band.
so, there’s that 😝