New Humanities Reader Source

As I was looking through the many citations used within the New Humanities Reader, I found myself especially interested in those which linked together the way actions of people from the past influence the actions by those in the future. With that, I was drawn to a specific quote which Lethem used in his piece which reads "...the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty" (Lethem 224). 

The quote is from Kembrew McLeod's 'Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity." Within this piece, while I did not read the entire book, the parts which I did read center around the idea that the way we take ownership over ideas and turn them into trademarks forces a lot of limitation on what people will be able to say in the future. He described how, as a prank, he tried to register a copyright for the phrase "freedom of expression." Therefore, if ever anyone wanted to use that phrase they would have to pay him money for it. This would be comical yet the story alone would speak for itself in regards to the main issue. 

This connects to my topic interest through the way that the restrictions placed on certain ideas and phrases in the past will influence the way we are able to think in the future, now having to credit ideas to its 'original innovators' when we might have interpreted them in a completely different way. 

McLeod, Kembrew. Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Print.