Monday, September 26, 2016

Mini Research Blog Post

The passage I selected is in "Usemonopoly" in the fifth paragraph from "When old laws..." to "had been invaded." I looked it up in the key and chose these few sentences specifically because they are the ones Lethem says comes from Jessica Litman's Digital Copyright. Naturally I looked up Digital Copyright and found it to be a book from 2001 on how copyright laws were made and whether or not they are practical. The book is in fact present in law school libraries around the country.
It seems to me that Litman's point of view lines up with that of Lethem, yet her work is more of a scholarly critique of copyright than "The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism" is. Lethem  makes use of Digital Copyright in talking about how copyright laws were clear-cut and easily managed when they were first put in place yet today in the digital era it is near impossible to decide when an owners right has been invaded and when it hasn't. Thereby he stays true to Litman's original intentions and draws influence from her without changing her vision or direction. It doesn't seem to me like this would violate and copyright laws because he is building on her idea in a larger context and Lethem therefore exemplifies the ideas he presents in the text in his own use of another authors work.

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