borrowed
In 1997, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a profile of a psychiatrist named Dorothy Lewis, entitled Damaged, which appeared in the February 24 issue of The New Yorker. Material from this piece was ‘repurposed’ by the playwright Bryony Lavery in her play Frozen. Gladwell discussed the repurposing of his material in another article, Something Borrowed, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, and later in his book What the Dog Saw. The following excerpts are from Something Borrowed:
“I see things week after week … and I see that they are using material that Jonathan and I brought to light … That would have been acceptable. But she did more than that. She took things about my own life, and that is the part that made me feel violated.” - Dorothy Lewis talking to Malcolm Gladwell “The whole thing was right there,” Lewis went on, “I was sitting at home reading the play, and I realised that it was I. I felt robbed and violated in some peculiar way. It was as if someone had stolen – I don’t believe in the soul, but, if there was such a thing, it was as if someone had stolen my essence.” “… the property of copyright is an odd kind of property …. I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don’t have it. But what am I taking when I take the good idea you had to put the picnic table in your backyard – by, for instance, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing that I am taking then?” - Lawrence Lessig “When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea” - Malcolm Gladwell “When I read the original reviews of Frozen, I noticed that time and again critics would use, without attribution, some version of the sentence “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.”That’s my phrase of course. I wrote it. Lavery borrowed it from me, and now the critics were borrowing it from her.” - Malcolm Gladwell “I faxed Bryony Lavery a letter: I am happy to be the source of inspiration for other writers, and had you asked for my permission to quote – even liberally – from my piece, I would have been delighted to oblige. But to lift material, without my approval, is theft.” - Malcolm Gladwell “Lavery wasn’t indifferent to other people’s intellectual property, then; she was just indifferent to my intellectual property. That’s because, in her eyes, what she took from me was different. It was, as she put it, “news.” She copied my description of Dorothy Lewis’s collaborator, Jonathan Pincus, conducting a neurological examination. She copied the description of the disruptive neurological effects of prolonged periods of high stress. She copied my transcription of the television interview with Franklin. She reproduced a quote that I had taken from a study of abused children, and she copied a quotation from Lewis on the nature of evil … she lifted sentences … she used my descriptions of Lewis’s work and the outline of Lewis’s life…” - Malcolm Gladwell “I just didn’t think I was doing the wrong thing...” - Bryony Lavery to Malcolm Gladwell
Coming now to excerpts from the work of other writers -
“During my general election campaign for the U.S. Senate, … my Republican opponent assigned a young man to track all my public appearances with a handheld camera. … whether because the young man was overzealous, or whether he had been instructed to try to provoke me, his tracking came to resemble stalking. From morning to night, he followed me everywhere, usually from a distance of no more than five or ten feet. He would film me riding down elevators. He would film me coming out of the restroom. He would film me on my cell phone, talking to my wife and children.
At first, I tried reasoning with him. I stopped to ask him his name, told him I understood he had a job to do, and suggested that he keep enough of a distance to allow me to have a conversation without him listening in. In the face of my entreaties, he remained largely mute, other than to say that his name was Justin. I suggested that he call his boss and find out whether this was in fact what the campaign intended for him to do. He told me that I was free to call myself, and gave me the number. After two or three days of this, I decided I’d had enough. With Justin fast on my heels, I strolled into the press office of the state capitol building and asked some of the reporters who were having lunch to gather round.
“Hey, guys,” I said, I want to introduce you to Justin. Justin here’s been assigned by the Ryan campaign to stalk me wherever I go.”
As I explained the situation, Justin stood there, continuing to film. The reporters turned to him and started peppering him with questions.
“You follow him into the bathroom?” “Are you this close to him all the time?”
Soon, several news crews arrived with their cameras to film Justin filming me … By six o’ clock, the story of Justin was on most local broadcasts. After several days … my opponent succumbed to the pressure, asked Justin to back up a few feet, and issued an apology. Still, the damage to his campaign was done. People might not have understood our contrasting views on Medicare or Middle East diplomacy. But they knew that my opponent’s campaign had violated a value – civil behavior – that they considered important.” - Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
“And can I still be in this … without becoming unrecognizable to myself – twisted by anger, resentment or remoteness?” - Hillary Clinton, What Happened
Nora : … Goodbye.
She goes out through the hall.
(…)
The sound of the street door being slammed is heard from below. - Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
Bibliography
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw (London: Penguin Books, 2010), pp. 222-243 Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008), pp. 64-65 Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (London: Simon & Schuster, 2018), p. 161 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House and Other Plays, (Penguin Classics, 2016), p. 188
