The same goes for music, the visual arts and just about every other creative enterprise. If you are an artist who doesn't understand how this works, then you are incredibly stupid.
I think the most ethical way of re-appropriating ideas from other sources is to use them as inspiration and not lift them verbatim. I've long been for the re-use of creative ideas, but I've always tried to avoid verbatim copying without attribution. Of course, if you are doing something like collage, you just can't do attribution. With writing, I always try to attribute sources. As the editor for Infoshop News, people know that I can be a fascist when it comes to sourcing re-posted news and opinion.
But art has always involved borrowing and appropriation. If we had to follow intelelctual property dictates strictly, then our arts would be dead.
But I can understand why B. is annoyed. It's not asking too much for that other writer to cite him as the source.
Chuck
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