de=da=duh=D'OH/ bloooooze and thievery

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

At 14.04 -0400 99-10-07, Paul Mather wrote:
>On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
>
>(First of all, welcome back!)

Glad to be here.

>Carl, as an academic, you should know that what Zeppelin did was a
>textbook case of plagiarism.  No ifs, ands, or buts...

Of course it is plagarism. What I'm saying is that what we call plagarism
used to be the rule rather than the shady exception. We in the modern
world, accustomed to copyright and authorship etc., look down on nicking
someone else's ideas and mucking around with them. Busting counterfeit
Pokemon merch is a big concern. This kind of thinking didn't used to apply.


>It's the "varying degrees" bit that is the key here.  If you put out a
>song that has the same title, same lyrics, and same music as one done by
>someone previously, but put it out under your own name, that's not
>"incorporating it to varying degrees" or however you might excuse it.
>It's just plain stealing---more so when you do it knowingly.

But it only matters that it's stealing *now*. It only matters because we
attach moral and monetary value to intellectual ownership. For, say, a
performer in an oral society in which intellectual ownership has little
meaning, what we call "stealing" and "plagarism" is standard practice.

>I would believe that a lot more had Led Zeppelin originated their
>material in the nascent field of the blues pioneers.  But since they got
>their's second-hand, through *recordings* (and, in some cases, with
>members---e.g., Page---*playing* with some of the forerunners involved),
>it's difficult for me to believe they had a hard time attributing the
>source of "You Shook Me," "I Can't Quit You Baby," etc.  At least in the
>case of the early blues pioneers there was a shortage of extant
>recordings to document claims.

Well, this is actually a big issue in current folklore studies: can we talk
about transmission of traditions in situations like this? What does it mean
to learn da blues from yer pappy compared with learning them from your
pappy's old 78s?

The thing is, that traditional elements in our own society/societies have
changed so dramatically since the Industrial Revolution that we haven't got
enough data points. One of the defining features of living traditions is
that they are always evolving--so was Led Zeppelin just part of blues
evolution (running afoul of modern copyright law in the process ;) ??
Whether or not Zeppelin deliberately evaded attribution is not really what
I'm thinking about--that's an issue of legal definition which isn't really
connected with the processes at work.

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~carl/