There is a small change in today’s blog. I doubt that even my most dedicated readers will notice it, so I’ll tell you what it is at the very beginning. I’ve removed the word “copyright” and the copyright symbol (c) from the tag at the end of the blog. While I would like to get credit for my ideas and for my writing, I have never had any intention of suing anyone or going to court over a quote lifted from something that I wrote. I’m not sure how original my ideas are in the first place. I am a fairly voracious reader. Although I don’t keep my books blog up to date very well, I am constantly reading words that others write. I read books, magazines, scholarly articles and journals. Increasingly I read online. I read the blogs of several other writers. I read scripture every day.

More often than not the ideas that are expressed in this blog come from my brain, which is filled with words that came from others. Although I’d like to think that I am an original thinker, the truth is that my ideas are deeply influenced by what I read and by the conversations I have with others. I’m pretty sure that the members of the pastors’ book club in which I participate can recognize the influence of the books we read together on my preaching.

While I try to acknowledge the source of my ideas, I don’t always know where an idea came from. I understand the technical definition of plagiarism and I try my best to avoid it by writing first thing in the morning without having others’ words in front of me while I write. I try to give credit when I am aware that something I am writing comes from another source.

So I’ve decided that any ideas that appear in the blog are going to be offered freely to whoever wants them. I doubt if I will ever attempt to publish in printed form the essays of the blog, but if that happens, I’ll deal with copyright issues at the time. For now, these are my thoughts. They have been heavily influenced by the thoughts of others. Fell free to play with these ideas in your own thinking.

Here is a story that has gotten a lot of attention. Back in 1996, in a big Apple product announcement presentation, Steve Jobs said, “Picasso had a saying - ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” There are two big problems with this quote. The first problem is that there is no evidence that Picasso ever said those words. Similar words have been attributed to Oscar Wilde who is reported to have said, “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Again, however, there is no documented evidence that Wilde said the words. The closest to a source for the quote comes from “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism” by T.S. Eliot, published in 1920:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. (p. 114)

And that brings us to the second problem with the quote, one that is more serious in my way of thinking. I’m not sure that Steve Jobs really meant it when he said it. At the time, Apple had been very successful in defending itself from patent infringement lawsuits. Many of the ideas incorporated into the early Lisa and Macintosh computers had been developed by research facilities like Xerox PARC and SRI. In 1989 Xerox PARC sued Apple for copyright infringement, but the lawsuits were unsuccessful. Perhaps it was the failure of those lawsuits that brought the quote about borrowing and stealing to Jobs’ mind and public speaking at a time when the company was in the process of developing wildly successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

By 2009, after he had been struggling with cancer, Jobs seemed to have taken on a different attitude:

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

I’m a pretty big fan of Apple products. I use them every day. And I followed Steve Jobs’ life and career since the mid 1980’s. I even met him face-to-face on one occasion when I officiated at a wedding that he attended. He complimented me on my leadership of the ceremony at the reception that followed. It was an event he soon forgot, but that I keep remembering. That said, I’m not in love with the attitude conveyed by his anger over his competitors’ products. It seems that he wanted to set up some kind of a double standard: When Apple steals, it’s creative. When someone else steals from Apple it is horrible and we will destroy them.

I’m not convinced that ideas are commodities that can be bought and sold like copyrights and patents. At least I’m not sure that it is good for the process of creative thinking for us to tread ideas like commodities. Sharing and adapting and borrowing and changing are the way our minds work. In an open society with lots of free-flowing ideas creativity increases not decreases.

I’m not a fan of high fashion, but I do happen to know that in the fashion industry it is not illegal to copy a design. It is only illegal to copy the label. And there is plenty of creative thinking going on in fashion design.

Maybe my words never belonged to me in the first place. I play with the order of words on the page (or on the screen in the case of my blog), but I’m using words that have been used before and will be used again and again. They aren’t mine.

Feel free to quote me on the topic.

I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.