The New Yorker recently ran an article about the iterations that a particular phrase may go through in the sphere of the public mind. Here’s a quote that voices a sentiment I quite agree with:

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. The plagiarist was being plagiarized. In this case, there is no “art” defense: nothing new was being done with that line. And this was not “news.” Yet do I really own “sins and symptoms”? There is a quote by Gandhi, it turns out, using the same two words, and I’m sure that if I were to plow through the body of English literature I would find the path littered with crimes of evil and crimes of illness. The central fact about the “Phantom” case is that Ray Repp, if he was borrowing from Andrew Lloyd Webber, certainly didn’t realize it, and Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t realize that he was borrowing from himself. Creative property, Lessig reminds us, has many lives—the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going.

The thing with intellectual property is that you just can’t control it like you can physical property. And as soon as something is in the public conciousness, it’s out of the control of its supposed “owner”’s control, whether or not the owner likes it. Artists are plagiarists; they always have been. And now, in the modern era of sampling and digital formats, artists are almost compelled to be. It’s hip to copy, and nothing will be able to stop it. Modern culture is built on amalgamation, on freshening the passe and the cliche, on adding and subtracting. The force of law is much like a man trying to stop a flood with his hand: unless he’s a miracle worker, he’s going to get swept away. As well he should.

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