Permission Society: Want To Quote A Single Sentence In A Book? Pay Up!
(crossposted from CreativeFreedom.org.nz)
Techdirt.com reports on Kyle Gann 
, a music professor, composer, and author who was working on his latest book but had to drop an entire section because he wasn’t allowed to quote short sentences that are, themselves, apparently considered works of art. Gann says “I’ve been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young’s “This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean,” and Yoko Ono’s “Listen to the sound of the earth turning” and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I’ve excised the pieces from the text.” Techdirt comments that “Yes, it’s become so impossible to quote a single short sentence, that it’s just not worth doing at all. Welcome to permission society. Some copyright system believers may claim that this is just the market at work, but it certainly seems a lot more like an undue restriction on freedom of expression at the hands of copyright law.”
