When I was a young cook, I followed a blog called Ideas in Food. The two writers of the blog were a husband and wife team who had previously worked in various interesting restaurants and were then doing private events. This was when both ‘molecular gastronomy’ and blogging were in vogue.
Out of all the many cooking blogs at the time, the content in Ideas in Food was probably the most consistently innovative. And they published something new nearly every day. Fine dining cooks at the time would read the most recent Ideas blog entry at home after their shift and then discuss it together the next day, or use an idea they had found there in developing a new dish.
What impressed me most at the time was the motto of the blog: ‘Ideas are free.’ I know that they made money through links on their site. Eventually they published a cookbook containing some of the ideas they had first written about in their blog. But their attitude towards sharing their discoveries with anyone who happened to have access to the internet was radically different from the attitude I found among some chefs I worked for, who instead insisted on secrecy. Many chefs will not share certain recipes with others, even those they work with.
I realized that those chefs who were secretive were the ones who had few ideas of their own. And that often the recipes they hid were those they had taken from others. It is true that there are those who will reproduce someone else’s dish and call it theirs. Just as there are artists and writers who might copy or plagiarize the work of another artist or writer. There are rock musicians that became millionaires by essentially rewriting the songs of poor blues musicians of a previous generation, and never giving those musicians any financial compensation or credit. Those same rock musicians will now sue anyone who song too closely resembles their own, as we have seen with the Rolling Stones.
It may be that the very idea of copyright does much to impoverish art. If you are a truly creative person, with many ideas of your own, why be upset if someone takes one of your ideas and develops their own interpretation of it? Particularly if they give you credit? In our time of instant access and social media, I would hope that someone blatantly copying someone else will eventually be found out.
For myself, I would rather be part of a group of people that are freely sharing ideas than to consider everything I produce as a potential commodity. What might have happened if copyright laws were stronger in Elizabethan England? What if Shakespeare had not been able to employ Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, and used a multiplicity of sources to develop his plays? We would be bereft of perhaps the greatest body of work in the history of English literature.
It might be argued that, with Shakespeare’s talent, he would developed his own ideas. It is difficult to argue about what might have been. But it is easy to ask what Ulysses by Joyce would have been without Homer. Or what The Wasteland would have been without Dante. Or what The Divine Comedy would have been without Virgil. Or what The Aeneid might have been without Homer’s work. And Homer himself, if he did exist: did he make up all those stories about the gods? Did he create the characters of the gods themselves? What if Whitman had sued other poets when they began to write in free verse?
Isn’t it the work of others that inspires us to create our own? How many actual words does the average writer create? Did Keith Richards discover a new way of playing the guitar, that he should be so possessive of a particular riff?
The problem, of course, is the seeming necessity for commodification. There is nothing I would love more than to have the money to get the best education, hire an agent and a publicist, and dedicate myself to writing full time. I know that many contemporary famous poets have done exactly that. Anyone, to be good at what they do, needs talent and dedication. But money gives someone the time and resources to develop talent and allow apply their dedication. How many nights have I only had time to scribble a few lines in a notebook at 1:30 in the morning after finally getting home from a twelve- to fourteen-hour shift?
I read a tweet by a well-known poet recently that said “I know there are some poets that can’t afford publicists.” Yes—some poets. Yesterday I saw the website of another poet I admire, who releases content exactly like that which I compose in this ‘notebook’—but only to those who are paid subscribers. It may be that when it comes time to renew my website in the spring that I won’t have the money to do so. But I’m not going to make people pay for what I hope is only one side of a conversation. I don’t want anyone to copy me. But I would love to speak, I love to be heard, and I especially love others to reply. Ideas are free.