Owning Words & Ideas

PEOPLE ARE SO KIND, always offering advice on how to promote a website, or ideas of things to write about, or ways to improve somebody elses writing; when Americans care, they really care! Many's the time when an email arrives from a lifelong friend, replete with an idea just bursting with the kind of energy which makes it a great online essay. Sometimes, the friend deliberately sends an idea for essay use, and says so. Sometimes a friend'll send an email which is intended to be nothing other than a personal chitty chat, and it will inadvertantly contain a great essay idea. Don't matter to me which kind comes, its all good, it'll all get used, and you can bank on that, all holler. Sometimes, when this happens, the arrival of an inadvertant nugget, the sender is surprised later to see "his" topic in a published essay. Sometimes, the sender is surprised, and not happy. I didn't know you were going to do that. I didn't expect you to do that. I didn't tell you to do that. You failed to obey my unspoken, implicit instructions for the proper use of what I sent you. And thus here we go again, and I have to explain it, all over again, to someone else. I have to explain it to one American at a time. When I give you something, its yours. When you give me something, a birthday present, information, a letter you wrote to me, its mine. We can all do whatever we want, with our own property, in America, long as nobody gets hurt.... Not only do we all seem to be confused about intellectual property rights, we seem to be a culture obsessed with personal property. Its almost laughable, really. And it would be, were we the fools not in such deadly earnest. We are so obsessed with our personal property rights that we can barely scare up enough land for parks and public schools in our gigantic land mass, and when we write letters or make comments to people, we think that we have an inalienable right to control the recipient's use of our words, merely because we spoke them. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. Of the property, by the property, for the property. But if you send a letter to somebody, and in it you solve Einstein's unified field theory, and don't include a statement of ownership, the person who gets it is perfectly free to tell his neighboer about the letter, and what's in it, so long as he gives you credit for cracking Einstein. After we speak, we still own authorship of our words, but we do not own the words. Mark Twain still owns Tom Sawyer, but I own the right to tell the story, as long as I mention where I got the idea. The next time somebody asks you "can you keep a secret?" Answer them: "Yes I can, but why should I, you can't."