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New Yorker on the tricky nature of copyright

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There’s a great (long) New Yorker piece this week covering the world of plagarism, copyright, and sampling. In it, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the story of an earlier article that ended up in a hit Broadway play and how in the end, he didn’t feel cheated but instead felt the playwright had created a new work of art. It covers the sticky situation where the real person the main character in the play was based on became displeased with the fictional aspects of her life(she was afraid friends would think she did the things the character did). All the loose ends are tied up with quotes from previous court decisions, books on the subject, and personal interviews with the playwright and subject of the original article.

Posted 16 November 2004

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