Why hide your source, we're all a recycling bin

When Barbara Taylor Bradford lost her legal battle with Sahara, I was reminded of an unusual incident which happened a few years ago. Penguin India had commissioned me to put together some quotations of my friend and philosopher U G Krishnamurthy, which I did.
Just before the book went into print, I received a call from the publishers, seeking to confirm the obvious — that the copyright rights would lie with Krishnamurthy.They were taken aback when I drew their attention to the disarming first quotation of the book. It says: "My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, and do what you like; even claim authorship without my consent or the permission of anybody."
I pointed out to them that it would seem absurd to put a copyright on a book when the author had clearly stated that he did not want one, as he did not believe in intellectual copyright. This threw Penguin India into a crisis. Never before in the history of publishing, it seemed, had an author not wanted his work copyrighted.
Since a publisher cannot publish a book without a copyright claim attached, we were stuck. Finally, the issue was resolved by me writing a one-page foreword, which was then copyrighted.
For me, there is nothing like plagiarism, since there is nothing like originality. The human brain is singularly incapable of doing anything creative. It is merely a recycling bin. Every word, every phrase, every thought that I flaunt as my own has been sourced from elsewhere. The self-proclaimed creatives who are so in awe of their own intellect, have merely concealed their source.
But intellect itself is acquired through repetition. Man is nothing but memory. If I read one book and steal from it you catch me on that, whereas if you have read a hundred, you are obviously better equipped to mix and match from many sources, and it becomes more difficult to trace.
The law has always understood that the gap between idea and expression is huge. An idea when lifted from one culture and expressed in a completely different culture metamorphoses into something else in the process. It is this idea/expression dichotomy which allows artists and writers to draw freely on the themes, myths and images that fill our culture.
The idea of star-crossed lovers would not be copyrightable, even if Shakespeare had written his version last week. He in fact took the plot of not only Romeo and Juliet, but most of his masterpieces from existing sources.
The legal battle for copyright will continue unabated. Let me conclude with a quote from Rumi, the Sufi mystic, which says it all: "My lamp was lit by another lamp."