40 An end to templates? BIRDIE BILL Written by Adam Lawrence FEATURE Imitation, said Oscar Wilde, is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to genius. Picasso put it slightly differently: “Talent borrows, genius steals”. Pretty much every creative person that has ever lived has drawn on the examples set by those who came before him: as Sir Isaac Newton put it, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. There are times when using quotations serves no purpose other than to demonstrate the author’s erudition. But in this case, the message is pretty clear: creativity does not exist in a vacuum, but depends on the work done before by others. A creative person is one who produces something new. But almost never entirely new. Creative people the world over give thanks every day for the existence of intellectual property laws, and curse those geographies where they are not so well implemented. It is intellectual property laws that stop the plagiarism of creative work – or at least punish it when it occurs – and which mean that writers, artists, musicians and the like, can make a (sometimes very good) living from what they do. But IP protection is not a clear-cut area, as the often rather complicated court cases that occasionally hit the headlines show. If someone steals an entire article, or song, and passes it off as something they have created, then all is fairly straightforward. But that isn’t usually what happens. Take the famous recent case when musician Ed Sheeran was sued by the estate of the late Marvin Gaye for allegedly copying Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ in his song ‘Thinking Out Loud’, which won the Grammy for Song of the Year in 2015. It is unarguable that the chord progressions of the two songs are very similar, but a chord progression cannot be copyrighted. In essence, the court decided that the elements of ‘Let’s Get It On’ that Sheeran was supposed to have copied were not, in themselves, sufficiently distinctive and original to warrant protection under copyright law. By contrast, the classic rock group Led Zeppelin had a habit of ‘basing’ their songs on classic blues numbers (but forgetting to credit the original author. Most obviously, The Lemon Song, from the 1969 album Led Legislation before the US Congress would extend the copyright protection that currently exists for buildings architecture to golf course design. But would that preclude the construction of classic hole designs, asks Adam Lawrence?
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