Through some kind of serendipity here lately I've come across several articles/blog posts that take a critical look at the cultural mandate that copying is not only bad, it's bad innovation. Not so, say these writers.

Malcolm Gladwell had a fascinating piece in the Nov. 22 New Yorker detailing his experience at having one of his articles plagiarized by playwright Briony Lavery in her Broadway play "Frozen." After talking with Lavery and reading Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, Gladwell ends up coming down against what he calls the "plagiarism fundamentalists":

"The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer's words have a virgin birth and an eternal life. I suppose I could get upset about what happened to my words. I could also simply acknowledge that I had a good, long run with that line--and let it go."

Meanwhile, on Nov. 20 over at the sift experiment blog, Jeremy Heigh offered this take on copying and innovation, via Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel:

"If half the challenge of innovation is communicating its value and someone else is always innovating, then building creative teams may not be nearly as efficient as building widely cast, open-minded sifting technologies to scour the universe for innovation hotspots and blueprinting those technologies for use at home. As Diamond says, complex innovations are best borrowed, not built. Because technology begets technology, the value of diffusion often exceeds the value of original invention."

And with all this churning around in my head, while cleaning out my email inbox, I came across one of Joyce Wycoff's Heads-Up! on Organizational Innovation newsletters from last August that described an article from Peter deJager's Managing Change & Technology newsletter on the distinction between innovation and cheating. The crux of the issue: A new service, process, or product that improves upon the current service, process or product is seen as an innovation from the perspective of the company that has produced it, but is seen as cheating from the perspective of the company whose service, process, or product was the one improved upon. De Jager's take:

"All businesses are threatened by innovation. How do we respond to it? By seeing innovation as unfair competition and wasting resources in legal battles that inevitably fail? Or by accepting that the world changes and then deciding we are best served by finding our own innovations?"

In every case, the end result is an affirmation of the value of an open society that doesn't put unnecessary limits on inventive recombination -- in art, in technology, or in business -- while still allowing for enough authorship rights that creators and inventors and artists can make a living. This is of course not the kind of society we are living in, but it seems that increasing numbers of people are trying to get us there.