Monday, November 15, 2004

In Something Borrowed, writer Malcolm Gladwell confronts what he first took to be a case of plagiarism of his work: reuse of phrases and concepts from an earlier New Yorker article he wrote in a Broadway play on the same topic. But as he explored the issue, he began to see reuse of his work in a different light, as part of the great chain of creativity. (Interestingly, while he ultimately seems to think the playwright was generally free to use his work and doesn't explicitly disagree with the playwright's distinction between fiction and "news," he still attributes quotes from other people and his transcription of someone else's television interview to himself -- not acknowledging that he wasn't the creator of those parts of the story.)

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