Via Booksquare, Marc Porter Zasada has an article in the LA Times about “extreme copyright.”

In extreme copyright, you try to push the limits of what intellectual property can be owned and controlled — or you try to penalize those who seem to have pushed the envelope a little too far. For example, not long ago, the family of Martin Luther King Jr. took CBS to court when the network used a tape it had made of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in a documentary (the family prevailed). And a government-authorized publisher tried to copyright official court opinions by arguing that it had introduced “original pagination” to the otherwise completely public documents — which must be cited every day by judges and lawyers.

On the trademark side, people try to register phrases such as “fair and balanced” or protect a single word, such as “Spike.” Marvel and DC Comics may sue you if you misuse the word “superhero,” which they — yes — trademarked in 1979.

These days, if you’re a Hollywood filmmaker and you shoot a passionate love scene in an art gallery and pan past a sculptural assemblage of tuna cans, you’d better get the permission of the artist, and probably StarKist (sorry, make that StarKist®) as well. Big studios employ whole teams to make sure such accidents don’t happen.

Meanwhile, journalists hunger to find derived language in the work of budding novelists. Scandal websites expose lifted phrases in the work of journalists. Computers search pop music for recycled phrases. And people who write little-known books sue when their ideas enter the culture in more popular books.

There’s a backlash as well: anti-copyright activists who believe copyright “is being used less and less to encourage creative work and more and more as a means to discourage it.” [Emphasis Zasada’s.]

I dunno. I can’t see an artist thinking, “Let some movie studio do a pan shot of my art? No! That’s too creative. Gotta force them to do shoot something bland instead.”

I think it’s more personal. For an artist or writer, it often comes down to wringing those extra pennies out of your work — and whether the additional exposure you get from someone’s “excerpt” (I use that term loosely here) will generate more pennies than what you’d get if you charge for the excerpt.

Or it may be wanting the pride of public attribution. I know that’s true of me, and my blog posts. I’d be most vexed if someone lifted my posts and reprinted them without attributing their authorship to me. (I also love to give attribution to others — I see the blogosphere as a self-organizing collection of information where attribution is key, like a hypertexted Wiki entry — you have to be able to trace the pieces back to their origin or you erode the integrity of the entire collection.)

Or it comes down to whether you believe people are trying to cheat you, and if so do you want to crusade against it.

For people who want to out plagiarists, it’s also personal: it’s the rush of proving moral superiority by exposing a scoundrel.

But here’s the thing. Our traditional notions of copyright are derived from our notions of ownership of physical property. We’re in the process, now, of figuring out whether we can apply guidelines based on the ownership of physical objects to stuff that isn’t physical at all, like someone’s name.

Digital technology serves to up the tension because digitized stuff shares more attributes with ideas, and fewer with physical property.

And of course the more a created work drifts toward the realm of ideas, the less plausible the notion of copyright. So just because you have an idea for a movie about a pirate ship — even if you’ve documented that idea — doesn’t mean you’ve been ripped off my Disney. OTOH, if a paragraph has been published in a printed book for all to see & touch, it’s obviously someone’s property . . .

Oh, well. Somewhere in this mess there’s a line that, once articulated, would put everyone at ease. But as long as there are lawyers willing to scuff the line away and ask for a new one, we’ll be wasting more time & energy on copyright battles . . .