Not long past I heard telll of a person who raged at a music artist for
creating two songs in separate albums that were so similar that you
could play them synced up against each other and it would sound like
one continuous song. The complaint was that this artist was “nothing
but a thief stealing from himself.” What’s more, since learning of this
story, I have seen many other circumstances where similar circumstances
are judged in a like manner. Basically now’a'days everyone agrees,
being unoriginal makes you a dirty rotten thief.

This is really sad and disturbing. I’m not saying that unoriginality
should be praised, but does the unoriginal person deserve to be
ostracized? Are all unoriginal creations equal violations of the basic
tenants of social order? For that is what you are claiming when you
claim that the artist who lacks originality is a thief. Stealing is a
universal evil, denounced by nearly all cultures and considered a
fundamental building block of society. So of course then it makes
perfect sense to say that if a person dares to build a new creative
work based on an old creative work they wrote years ago then they are
contributing to the death of disintegration society and should be
locked up. Obviously this follows.

This is how backwards and turned around we’ve gotten these days. We
really are starting to think of all events of the mind however fluid
and intangible as property. Though there is clearly no consistent
logical way to adjudicate disputes over ownership of things so ethereal
we are determined to push forth making decisions on the right and wrong
of the re-usage of thoughts by way of whim and witlessness. Though one
unit can become a trillion and back to zero in an instant; though one
element can change into any other element imaginable or even become
something fully incomprehensibe and then turn back unto itself still we
will judge some of those creative geniuses who strive to change this
mutuable chaos as villians and others as saints when the difference
between the groups will be only whatever we happen to invent as our
distinguishing factor at the time.

The truth is that if someone uses an idea of  their own from the
past they are being unoriginal, not evil. This might well be a reason
why you might dislike their work, maybe even hate it to the point that
you refuse to partake in any of that artist’s works again, but it is
NOT a reason to condemn the person. We should not be so arrogant as to
demand perfect originality from are artists all the time. We certainly
shouldn’t contemplate charging them fines or locking them in prison for
failing to be original.  It is especially absurd because
originality is not the only nor even the most important measure of
quality. Often a derivative work can far surpass the source material.
Many of our greatest works of art are hodgepodges of many other works
through past and history.  There are times when originality can
make a work better and there are times when it can make it worse. There
are times when an artist can copy from himself so much that it makes
all of his fans totally disgusted with himself,  but there are
other times when an artist can create an maintain a loyal following by
creating a tradition through purposeful reuse of many consistent
elements.

But of course the ultimate irony of all is that the exact best way to
encourage originality is to do exactly the opposite of the things we do
now to try and secure our artist’s content ownership. That is to say,
by opening up so called intellectual property laws you would create
more creative competition which would in turn force individuals and
companies to innovate in order to get people to buy their works over
any of the possibly cheaper knock offs of all previous works.  You
couldn’t hide behind a cushy monopoly on all your old ideas so that you
can sell them again and again and again to an art starved audience who
will take anything they can get.  Artists would only resort to
stealing from themselves when there is a good chance that might
actually make them money (or at least enough money to make it more cost
efficient than taking up the time to invent something new)  which
under an unrestictrictive or non-existence copyright system probably
won’t be all that often. Creativity would thrive.

Instead we’re just going to make all artists thieves. Just some of them we’ll gracefully allow to “get away with it”. Yuck.