The new Creative Commons licenses are spreading around the blogsphere. I popped onto the site yesterday to check them out for myself… and this morning I have decided not to add one here.
I have no quarrel with Creative Commons. What they’re doing is terrific. More power to them. I fear I have been irretrievably warped by a much older writing ethic, however, one that doesn’t fit with Creative Commons.
In the early seventeenth century, Mateo Alemán lost his temper when some unknown wrote a spurious sequel to his picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache. He wrote his anger into a sequel of his own.
Now, I’ve read Guzmán de Alfarache, and as far as I’m concerned less would have been more—the good stuff lives in the first half.
But the curious thing is, this happened again not long after. Somebody ripped off a bit character from Guzmán to create La pícara Justina, which isn’t bad stuff at all. Wouldn’t happen these days, of course, what with mise en scène lawsuits.
Nor was that the final ripoff in the tangled history of the picaresque novel. The eventual victim was one Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra—perhaps you’ve heard of him—and the book was El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, which of course you have heard of. The result, as with the Guzmán, was a sequel by the author.
I praise the ripoff artist who authored the spurious Quixote continuation, myself, though I’ve never read it and don’t really care to—because the second half of Don Quixote is bloody brilliant, much richer than the very rich first half, and without the ripoff artist who knows whether we’d have it?
(I hope I need not say that under current copyright regime both Alemán and Cervantes would simply have sued. Neither of them was exactly rich.)
To me, these are appropriate revenges on an appropriate field of battle, revenges that enrich us all. What good to world culture is a court fight over creativity? What is the good of automatically branding creativity with the mark of the lawyers, as if there were no other way to think or act toward it?
The only unchanging language is a dead one. The only creative work never to be reworked, rethought, stolen from, excerpted, (yes, even) copied is—a dead one. The legal arena of copyright, even the benign-by-comparison Creative Commons form of it, is murdering creative works both existing and potential. Killing them dead.
So CavLec will remain my small gesture toward life. No copyright notice, no Creative Commons license, no nothing. Plunder away.
If you think you can get away with it, that is. Alemán and Cervantes proved that there are other arenas than the legal.
