Gia' e' la rivista che, benche' cara, rinnovo con maggior convinzione anno dopo anno. Se poi mi scrivono anche articoli cosi'... :-) juan carlos *J.D. Salinger's miserly legal legacy * Jan 17th 2011, 23:07 by W.W. | IOWA CITY http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/01/copywrongs J.D. SALINGER'S infamous mania for privacy included a rather self-defeating litigious streak. One of the author's final public acts was to file a lawsuit enjoining the publication of a book that otherwise would have passed immediately into obscurity. [...] 'Some stories, my property, have been stolen,' Mr. Salinger said. 'Someone's appropriated them. It's an illicit act. It's unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That's how I feel.' As a matter of justice, surely Salinger was owed some the proceeds from the sale of this volume. Naturally Salinger sued, seeking a tidy sum in damages. Yet these were works he meant never to republish, so it's doubtful the prospect of lost profits was the source of his ire. And I don't buy his defence. As Nina Paley delightfully illustrates <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4>, making copies of something is utterly unlike stealing a coat. When somebody steals your coat, you can't wear it any more. If somebody distributes copies of your stories, there's more for everyone. Try an alternative story: "Suppose you're a domineering patriarch who insists on telling his typically compliant middle-aged children to eat grits for breakfast and suddenly one day they don't. That's how I feel." The only thing Salinger really lost was his jealously guarded sense of exclusive control over everything he ever had a hand in creating. Whether or not this kind of loss counts as a real harm, whether there is a legitimate moral entitlement to this kind of exclusive and comprehensive control of one's creative work, is one of the great questions of our age. Given the all-too-successful legal and legislative efforts of Disney, the recording industry and artists like Salinger, the prevailing model of copyright has come to appear as yet one more way in which our political economy is rigged to protect privilege. This shift in perception can be explained by a bigger shift in our creative culture. The rise of the arts of the sample, the remix and the mashup alongside the emergence of the open-source software movement <http://www.economist.com/node/17899970> has engendered a growing sense that creative work both draws from and adds to a common pool of shared culture. This change in the mood and tools of the creative class has made Salinger's legal aggression against biographers, filmmakers and inferior writers seem less like charming New Hampshire get-off-my-lawn curmudgeonism and more like a contemptible failure of generosity. A decent man does not shoot at kids taking a shortcut across his back forty. But Salinger, again and again, lawyered up, aimed carefully, and fired.