As the Molotov Man essay discussed the copyright issue on the artwork and photography, Jonathan Lethem wrote about the ambiguity of plagiarism in literature and music. He took the novel Lolita from Nabokov and an earlier author Heinz von Lichberg as an example to illustrate that it is hard to delimitate borrow and plagiarism in the literary works. The hardness is because, for a new writer or learner, the fastest way to improve is to imitate, which may lead to the problem of improper borrowing.
In this case, the meaning of plagiarism changes to the “appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act”, especially in the modern forms of arts. Many forms of moderns arts of different genres all face similar problems of how much we can borrow from the old work and not get into the plagiarism. In the music field, there may be more tolerance in the open source and sources that can be freely reworked. But in other art forms, the borrow of the old artwork is a kind of “enframing” according to Martin Heidegger, since all of the reworked art pieces involves the artists’ personal intention and ideology, they are only borrowing the elements or the objects but give them different properties. In my opinion, this kind of borrowing should be alert to the artists, as the article says “A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted.” If we take the behavior of recreating the previous work for granted, the mark of our modern time has no unique characteristics and original thoughts that can distinguish us from the previous generation. The copyright, not only the copyright of art works or literatures, but also the intellectual property and other forms of patents should be protected so that it can “promote the progress of science and useful arts” with creativity and innovations.