Siva Valdhyanathan and "Contamination Anxiety" : a Study of Lethem

Lethem quotes Siva Valdhyanathan in the section of “Contamination Anxiety”. His book Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity is about how copyrights can limit the creativity and how fair use is more complicated than just what the law says, especially as modern technology disperses ideas into the culture of the internet much faster than ever before in history. He and Lethem take similar stances, in that they both agree ideas can and should propagate through culture and by including snippets of works of predecessors, artists are not stealing from them, but paying tribute to them. Valdhyanathan is trying to make case using his quote that all music takes something from others. He is raising the question of whether ideas passed down through generation are owned by someone or not. He is challenging the Anglo-Saxon belief of ownership of thoughts. Lethem is also using the quote in a similar way. He is saying that just because the music is reused from others and is not 100% original, does not make it not new. He is saying that Watters is passing on the old song for the new generation. Just because these two ways of using this quote are similar, does not Lethem did not change the meaning. Lethem is focused on the passing on of ideas and validating his point that a new rendition is not stealing at all. Valdhyanathan is concerned with explaining how songs are passed down through a kind of master-apprentice line, which extends to the beginning of civilization. These show that while ideas can be similar, they can also provide new insight to the world by changing the way they are framed.