Research in LA&PS

Copying: a right? New controversial book

A new book by a York University professor argues that the act of copying, much maligned in our culture, is fundamentally necessary to our evolution.

In Praise of Copying explores different aspects of copying and looks at everything from quilting and cooking to gang warfare and martial arts as cultures of the copy. Published by Harvard University Press, it features an entire chapter on the saga of Louis Vuitton and the fake handbags which have become ubiquitous today.

“Teaching contemporary literature and culture at a university, I was interested in students’ attitudes about sampling, cutting and pasting, plagiarism, downloading and such matters,” says author Marcus Boon, a professor in the Department of English in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

“What struck me is that they were completely unable to justify their interest in these things – mostly because they involve copying and they’d repeatedly been told that copying is bad. At the same time," he says, "when I looked at the literature on intellectual property, I was struck by the fact that most of it was written by legal scholars, who seemed to offer no analysis of copying itself, beyond the fact that it was a useful tool that could also be misused. So I wanted to rethink the idea of copying, and show how fundamental philosophical issues shape the way we think about it today.”

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