In the “Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism”, the author discusses the definition of copyright and how it has affected the culture industry. Interestingly, Lethem says that “finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. ” The art we’ve got could also be the special perspective that we’ve learned from others’ art. In other words, there’s hard to make a definite boundary between copying and original. As a result, copyright laws alter as the mainstream social perception of this kind of adoption changes.
Copyright is an arguable concept in this article.
Lethem starts his argument from an interesting perspective, which is the art-creating process. He argues that artists actually create from existing works of others, “reinterpreting and recreating” them from their “unique perspectives”. As the saying goes, a thousand people have a thousand Hamlet, thus, everyone has a unique interpretation. In addition, translation, appropriation of others also change the meaning of the original art.
However, this kind of art recreation doesn’t lead us to a better art world. For example, the author explains how Disney, which is with an extreme situation with their levity in copyright laws, has taken inspiration from past artists like Shakespeare. If there’s no regulation on this, the coming generations would keep responding to the “same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors.” Eventually, we are only to end up with a smaller and smaller world and less diversity of the culture, by reproducing and copying ideas off of each other’s art,
Therefore, though copyright is a barrier for communicating the different thoughts and a stagnation for art to grow, it is still a “necessary evil”, says Thomas Jefferson. As Lethem mentioned, it is “an ongoing social negotiation”. However, restrict copyright laws certainly won’t be sustainable, especially as digital technology develops so rapidly that none of the rules is able to regulate both the existing art forms or the coming soon ones on these new media. So the current environment for copyright is more flexible, protecting the right for the original author without banning others’ from accessing or referring them. It seems that copyright today does try to “promote the progress of science and useful arts “. But does the nowadays copyright situation is truly beneficial to the culture industry? Because of the economic use of copyright and art probably do not really follow the original idea of the laws. People prefer to utilize it as a tool to amass wealth.