Once a Joke Goes Viral, Who Cares Where It Came From? (2015)
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
I have had lots of ideas that were derivative of other people's work. Maybe almost all of my ideas. Coming up with anything truly unique is super hard!
I have written a lot in my career, but most of it is for clients and courts. Much of it is quite original in a sense, because the facts of any two circumstances are never quite the same. However, my legal writing is almost certainly never going to be used by anyone else to make money or take credit that I might otherwise think should be mine. But I have made money by doing all of this writing.
On the other hand, I used to be a professional editor and sometimes writer. Some of that work could much more easily be used by someone else either to make money or to be passed off as their original ideas etc. That's where I would start to feel bothered if I weren't given credit or compensated for that work.
But the actual work of coming up with ideas, writing them down, and giving them to someone else to read is not really very different between those two (or three if you count writing and editing as different) jobs! So why would I feel differently? Why do I want credit for one, but not the other?
We value our personalities, our distinctiveness, more than we value our characteristics that are shared with others. Anything that's creative in an artistic way we see as being more valuable that things we produce simply by being conduits of information -- making up a joke and telling it and getting a laugh feels much better than telling someone else's joke and getting a laugh.
You want credit for the cultural value but not the mere ability to transmit information, the later being something that's essential inherent in your physical make up, the former being creative output of your personality and more unique characteristics.
A simpler way to look at it is that if people can make money from something then it's valued by society. You seek recompense for the value you add because you've been trained to do so.
https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/965428890830344193
https://twitter.com/daveexmachina/status/1106964873299329026
Including my favourite, crossovers with other memes:
“Epicurus,” you reply, “uttered these words; what are you doing with another’s property?” Any truth, I maintain, is my own property. And I shall continue to heap quotations from Epicurus upon you, so that all persons who swear by the words of another, and put a value upon the speaker and not upon the thing spoken, may understand that the best ideas are common property. Farewell.
-Seneca the Younger
If it’s not upvoted/reposted enough it’s not funny.
And like that Key & Peele skit, it doesn’t do you well to insist that you created something if someone else makes it popular
(but seriously though, appropriating something without credit is not cool.)
Artists don't, in general, credit the architects of buildings they draw, nor the gardeners or horticulturalists who make other scenes they might paint/draw. Singers don't credit the creators of life stories they write ballads about.
[IMO the politician is not there as themselves, they're a corporate body really, they can represent views that honestly they wouldn't hold because their backers -- financial, moral, political, or otherwise - hold those views. The problem with that is they don't identify the corporation they represent, IMO they really should be giving traceable credit for all of their inputs.]
This is an argument in favor of an AI-based government.
Credit can be in other forms, e.g. monetary payment. I don't get public attribution for work completed for my employer, my bank account does get credited each month though.
That's typically a work for hire though. When I load up Photoshop and click on About, I don't see a list of all the developers that wrote the code. I think speech writing is the same thing.
Yeah, the circumstance is called explicit permission. Appropriating is the wrong word here, the speech writers agree to this, and may also get paid, as others pointed out. It’s completely different than using someone else’s work without permission.
> Artists don’t, in general, credit the architects of buildings
Why should this be considered a valid analogy to using someone else’s work? The artists drawing a building aren’t borrowing the building plans to create another building, they’re drawing it and stopping with the drawing. That’s completely different from using someone’s work directly.
I think it's great despite the obvious pettiness attached to the practice.
This comment has more to do with the question posed by the headline, which I found didn't match the article very well.
The later paragraphs do show the link between headline and the content. No? Looks like the final straw that broke him was Lloyd's infringment lawsuite accusing him of stealing from a film which he co-wrote.
have you
have you heard
have you heard the
have you heard the one
have you heard the one about
have you heard the one about traceroute
It's not a good joke, but I still laugh whenever I hear it.
"what does a dyslexic zombie say?"