Quit While You're Ahead... Everyone's Going to Steal it Anyway

I found Barthes' idea of the reader as Author fascinating.

I'd never considered before what role the reader has in the authorship of a work, but in considering Barthes' article I find that everything makes perfect sense. Why is it that thousands of parents every year demand to have certain classic books banned from their childrens' schools even after generations of children have read them and not been (so far as I know) permanently scarred by the experience? It's not that these parents hare having a fundamental disconnect between the text and reality (though I'd probably prefer to argue they do), it's that the meaning they author and knit to the text is simply different, and somehow more threatening, than the meaning that everyone else understands the text to have.

This also raises the question, however, that if the meaning is not created until the reader is exposed to the work, how much ownership of the work does the literal "author" or "writer" retain? Copyright abuse has been going on as long as the concept of copyrighting has existed (if we are to believe Nesbit), but from this point of view, can it possibly be considered abuse? And can anything really be copyrighted? Does Luke Skywalker belong solely to George Lucas even though millions of fans have adopted this character as their own and spun their own fantasies and ideas around him? Though Lucas is the originator of the character, the claiming of the character by the fans is almost a stronger, albeit communal, stake of ownership. It seems that when a "cultural" work is popular enough, it simply transcends the bounds of copyright and "cultural" work and becomes almost archetypal... something that belongs to everyone.

Maybe creative commons really is the way to go.