The shadow over the near past in fiction

Imagine that you are writing a story about two young men in a car on a road trip. The time is recent, and the car’s radio is on. For a minimalist, this is already becoming too much information, but most writers will have bought into the notions of detailed characterization and sense of place and will want to allow readers to hear what is playing. If the youthful adventurers are fans of Palestrina and have found a public station playing his music — perhaps an episode of Harmonia — all is well. The words have been in the public domain for a long time. If you are good at creating lyrics for songs that sound like what gets airtime today, the same is true. But if you want to include the color of contemporary culture as the story’s setting, you are going to run up against the limitations of copyright.

This subject is a strange one in the history of writing. In the ancient world, many authors borrowed the names of legendary figures to attach credibility to their work. King Solomon, for example, got a lot attributed to him that he never read, much less wrote. And for most of the history of human creativity, the understanding of intellectual property was rudimentary, if accepted at all. Chaucer used the structure of Boccaccio’s Decameron and some of his stories, as well as the tales of other writers from continental Europe. And quoting or alluding to the works of others was in many periods a sign of one’s education. John Milton is a case of this, as he is one of the most literate writers in the English language, and he puts his learning on display…