Authorship
Out of context: Reply #32
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@Continuity;
I agree. I reckon that the guy who sparked the debate could have carried out his project with more dignity and class.
It's always worth trying to use a degree of empathy - placing yourself in the other person's shoes. By doing this, I think _anyone_ could understand how the originator became annoyed by the extreme similarity between the two works.
Having said that - I do think the value that society places in originality is changing, and I think it's quite interesting to think about why the change is occurring.
First of all - why is originality important? Why is the person who came up with the idea, valued more than a person who's in charge of implementation?
I think 'originality' has traditionally been valued because it encourages social, intellectual and economic progress. By allowing a person to _own_ an idea, all members of society are encouraged to innovate fiercely. At a guess, I'd imagine that the industrial revolution played a large part in helping us to form and accept this view.
The industrial revolution was driven by an economic model that places value according to how scarce a resource is .. by applying the same logic to ideas, an original (scarce) idea is worth most - and western culture has developed to accommodate the world-view that ownership (via authorship) should always be honoured.