Section:
PERIPHERAL VISION
alternative design. By the time of his death earlier this year [Ed. note: See Intro-Spectives in PRINT's
May/June issue], he had seen many of his most hotly disputed ideas become accepted design wisdom, if not
design practice. One of them, however, remains fiercely controversial. Believing that "there is something
basically wrong with the whole concept of patents and copyrights," Papanek declined to patent his designs.
His critics scoffed that no one would bother stealing them anyway. Actually, they were ripped off in large
numbers, for personal use as well as for profit. "If I design a toy that provides therapeutic exercise for
handicapped children, then I think it is unjust to delay the release of the design by a year and a half, going
through a patent application," Papanek wrote. "I feel that ideas are plentiful and cheap, and it is wrong to
make money off the needs of others."
I don't know how money is ever made except off the needs (real or imagined) of others, but the issue here
is not money but the rights to what it can't entirely buy.
The late Dr. Gerald Fagan, a resident psychiatrist at a boys' school, relieved the guilt of students who
masturbated by reminding them: "It's yours, isn't it?" But it isn't always so easy to know what belongs to us.
The protection, and even the identification, of what's yours has been vastly complicated by technology. As
media for distributing ideas are multiplied, amplified, and reduced in price, ownership of so-called
intellectual property becomes increasingly ambiguous. Even the ownership of hard goods has been softly
defined for generations. In Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Willie Loman's refrigerator and car are
falling apart at the same time as he is. "Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it's
broken!" Willie cries. "They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're
used up." In the audience we smile and nod in recognition, for we are an audience and a society of renters.
The rights to what we do own are subject to interpretation. When film mavens objected to Ted Turner's
colorizing black-and-white movie classics, he replied, "The last time I looked, I owned them"--his way of
saying he was entitled to make them all mauve if he wished, or keep anyone else from seeing them.
Are there public rights to private property? The nadir of my adolescence was not ache, or being turned
down by May Allen for the senior prom, or even being suspended from high school. It was a strike by
ASCAP--the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers--and until it was settled radio stations
were prohibited from broadcasting music or lyrics produced by its members. I don't remember exactly how
long it lasted, but for what seemed like forever the only songs we heard were in the public domain, usually
by Stephen Foster. We understood dimly that the rights of creators to the material they had created were at
stake, but we wanted the music back. If the concept of intellectual property was in legal vogue then, none
of us would have thought it applied to "Darn That Dream" or "Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy."
The inheritance of intellectual property is more problematic. The son of a vaudeville comedian, having been
given his father's name at birth and taken over his father's act when the old man died, proudly advertised in
the trade papers: "This act is not a copy. It is a legacy." Today, Dickensjan court battles rage over whether
families own in perpetuity the images of their celebrity ancestors. I love a Gershwin tune, but if I can't play
one without paying, whom do I pay? Not George and Ira, who have no further use for royalties. The
Gershwin Family Trust? Well, why not? If families can inherit money, why shouldn't they inherit cultural
resources that can be turned into money?
One reason is that cultural resources not only enrich us but enrich each other through us. Our copyright
laws have always acknowledged this by providing only temporary coverage, after which the private holdings
become public domain. But temporary anything has a way of becoming at least semi-permanent. Copyright
law has been extended over the years, and there is a good chance it will now be extended for another two
decades. (Had that been in effect during the ASCAP revolt of my youth, nothing but Baroque would have
been public domain.) A Gershwin trustee warned that without such protection, "someone could turn Porgy
and Bess, into rap music." A dreadful prospect, I guess, but folklorist Steve Zeitlin, noting that Gershwin's
opera itself drew on African-American musical traditions, asks, "What could be more appropriate?" Zeitlin
finds it similarly ironic that Disney, having used "Snow White" and other public domain materials for major
productions, anxiously seeks to protect forever the sanctity of Mickey Mouse, which strikes some people as
a Mickey Mouse idea.
Designers know the danger of letting work go unprotected--the danger not only of theft by competitors but
of erosion through the negligence of managers who can't see, don't care, or have designs (and designers)
of their own. The elaborate graphics standards manuals, devised as security systems, have often been
ineffective because the people who understood them were not in control of their implementation.
Intellectual property implies the commodification of what cannot be commodified. If we protect it, why not
protect emotional property as well? When William Styron wrote about the Nat Turner uprising, blacks
challenged his right to write about the slave experience, on the grounds that it belonged to them collectively
and exclusively. A comparable possessiveness attaches to the Holocaust as a phenomenon uniquely
applicable to Jews but not to the Gypsies and gays who were also sent to Nazi death camps, or to the
Armenians and Rwandans slaughtered at other times under other auspices. When David Leavitt based a
novel on the homoerotic autobiographical writing of Stephen Spender, the elderly poet sued, telling Leavitt
to get his own sex life instead of appropriating someone else's old one.
But Leavitt was writing fiction, in which personal experience may be transferable. In Charles Williams's
Descent into Hell, Pauline tells Peter about a recurring event that terrifies her. He can't do anything about
the recurring event, but he offers to carry the fear for her, just as he would carry a parcel or her books. It's
still her fear, he explains, but with him as designated schlepper, she won't have to do the fearing.
No one has yet copyrighted an idiosyncracy or patented a neurosis, but James Thurber has shown us the
way: A character in a Thurber story steals another man's dream. Another character in a Thurber cartoon has
a friend accompany him to the doctor's office, where he registers the unprecedented medical complaint,
"I've got Bright's disease and he's got mine."
"What's mine is yours" is the posture of a saint. "What's yours is mine" is the ideology of a mugger. Frankly,
I do not know how to reconcile them. I think I understand rights and privileges in respect to owning things-whether one-off or mass produced. If I find a rock, it's mine. If I fashion it into a tool, it is more decisively
mine, because my hands shaped it and my imagination told them how. If it is mine, then, because I am no
saint, it is not yours. You therefore have been served with a moral injunction not to covet my rock and a
criminal code forbidding you to take it if you do covet it. However, if I give it to you or leave it to you, the
rock is yours, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.
Thereto is the rub. What rights and privileges pertain to the rocks in your head? And where do they go
when your head is gone? Some things that are yours are part of you. No one can take them from you, but it
hurts when they try. To be plagiarized is, as Steve Heller indicated recently in PRINT, to be "violated." This
can be accomplished with, dazzling chutzpah, as when someone overseas used a couple of pages from an
article of mine without attribution, then quoted an additional paragraph from the same article, as if I had
written it, which of course I had. Thus he put me in the curious position of agreeing with myself.
Sometimes what looks like plagiarism is simply coincidence. But not all coincidence is entirely coincidental.
After driving to Wesleyan University to hear the brilliant Suzanne Langer lecture on signs and symbols, I
was disappointed to find that she really had nothing more to say on the subject than I had already said in a
lecture of my own. Driving home, I figured out why. My ideas were as good as hers because they were hers
to start with! I had absorbed them from reading her books.
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By Ralph Caplan