Came across letters to the editor today, and had to go look at the original article... the letters are posted at the bottom...
---------------
New York Times
July 12, 2003
Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?
By JON PARELES

An alert Bob Dylan fan was reading Dr. Junichi Saga's "Confessions of a Yakuza" (Kodansha America, 1991) when some familiar phrases jumped out at him. There were a dozen sentences similar to lines from songs on Mr. Dylan's 2001 album, " 'Love and Theft,' " particularly one called "Floater (Too Much to Ask)."
In the book a father is described as being "like a feudal lord," a phrase Mr. Dylan uses. A character in the book says, "I'm not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded"; Mr. Dylan sings, "I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound." Mr. Dylan has neither confirmed nor denied reading the book or drawing on it; he could not be reached for comment, a Columbia Records spokeswoman said.
The Wall Street Journal reported the probable borrowings on Tuesday as front-page news. After recent uproars over historians and journalists who used other researchers' material without attribution, could it be that the great songwriter was now exposed as one more plagiarist?
Not exactly. Mr. Dylan was not purporting to present original research on the culture of yakuza, the Japanese gangsters. Nor was he setting unbroken stretches of the book to music. The 16 verses of "Floater" include plenty of material that is not in "Confessions of a Yakuza," although the song's subtitle and its last line — "Tears or not, it's too much to ask" — do directly echo the book. Unlike Led Zeppelin, which thinly disguised Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" as "The Lemon Song" and took credit for writing it, Mr. Dylan wasn't singing anyone else's song as his own.
He was simply doing what he has always done: writing songs that are information collages. Allusions and memories, fragments of dialogue and nuggets of tradition have always been part of Mr. Dylan's songs, all stitched together like crazy quilts.
Sometimes Mr. Dylan cites his sources, as he did in "High Water (for Charley Patton)" from the " `Love and Theft' " album. But more often he does not. While die-hard fans happily footnote the songs, more casual listeners pick up the atmosphere, sensing that an archaic turn of phrase or a vaguely familiar line may well come from somewhere else. His lyrics are like magpies' nests, full of shiny fragments from parts unknown.
Mr. Dylan's music does the same thing, drawing on the blues, Appalachian songs, Tin Pan Alley, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime and more. "Blowin' in the Wind," his breakthrough song, took its melody from an antislavery spiritual, "No More Auction Block," just as Woody Guthrie had drawn on tunes recorded by the Carter Family. They thought of themselves as part of a folk process, dipping into a shared cultural heritage in ways that speak to the moment.
The hoopla over " `Love and Theft' " and "Confessions of a Yakuza" is a symptom of a growing misunderstanding about culture's ownership and evolution, a misunderstanding that has accelerated as humanity's oral tradition migrates to the Internet. Ideas aren't meant to be carved in stone and left inviolate; they're meant to stimulate the next idea and the next.
Because information is now copied and transferred more quickly than ever, a panicky reaction has set in among corporations and some artists who fear a time when they won't be able to make a profit selling their information (in the form of music, images, movies, computer software). As the Internet puts a huge shared cultural heritage within reach, they want to collect fees or block access. Amazingly enough, some musicians want to prevent people from casually listening to their music, much less building new tunes on it.
Companies with large copyright holdings are also hoping to whittle away the safe harbor in copyright law called fair use, which allows limited and ambiguously defined amounts of imitation for education, criticism, parody and other purposes. The companies also want to prevent copyrighted works from entering the public domain, where they can be freely copied and distributed. The Supreme Court recently ruled, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, that individual copyrights could extend for 70 years after the life of the creator, or in the case of a corporation, for 95 years. As a result, Mickey Mouse will be kept out of the public domain — that shared cultural heritage — until 2024.
The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist, Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He's reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending they don't exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and extension, emulation and mockery — that's how individual artists and the arts themselves evolve. It's a process that is neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan's album title " `Love and Theft,' " which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy by Eric Lott.
Hip-hop, ever in the vanguard, ran into problems in the mid-1980's when the technique of sampling — copying and adapting a riff, a beat and sometimes a hook or a whole chorus to build a new track — was challenged by copyright holders demanding payment even for snippets. Although sampling was just a technological extension of the age-old process of learning through imitation, producers who use samples now pay up instead of trying to set precedents for fair use.
That might be a good idea; a song that recycles a whole melody (like Puff Daddy's productions) calls for different treatment than a song that borrows a few notes from a horn section, and courts are not the best place for aesthetic distinctions. But in practice, it means fewer samples per track, and it can make complex assemblages prohibitively expensive. Mixes heard only in clubs and bootleg recordings are now the outlets for untrammeled sampling experiments. Yet, samples have extended and revived careers for many musicians when listeners went looking for the sources.
Mr. Dylan has apparently sampled "Confessions of a Yakuza," remixing lines from the book into his own fractured tales of romance and mortality on " `Love and Theft.' " The result, as in many collages and sampled tracks, is a new work that in no way affects the integrity of the existing one and that only draws attention to it.
Dr. Saga has no need to keep his book isolated. He told The Associated Press that he was ecstatic to have inspired such a well-known songwriter. And as news of the Dylan connection surfaced, sales of "Confessions of a Yakuza" jumped. Yesterday it was No. 117 among the best-selling books at Amazon.com, and No. 8 among biographies and memoirs.
Of course, Dr. Saga can't be too possessive about the writing. The book is an oral history, told to him by the yakuza gangster of the title. It's another story that has drifted into humanity's oral tradition. Mr. Dylan's complete lyrics are freely available at www.bobdylan.com. As for the song, if someone asks Mr. Dylan for sampling rights, it would be only fair to grant them.

------------
Dylan's Lyrics: Something Borrowed . . . (2 Letters)

To the Editor:
Re "Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?," by Jon Pareles (Critic's Notebook, July 12):
The concept of plagiarism in the work of a singer and writer of folk songs as opposed to the printed work of a historian or novelist is shaky at best.
Bob Dylan, who in about 40 years has created a body of work that defines America in his time and is the memory of several generations, has always borrowed from philosophers, poets and songwriters before him; the astute Dylan fan could often tell who he was reading at the time he was writing in the various stages of his career, the Bible often being a prime source.
This is in the nature of the folk music tradition, as people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger attest. This is much ado about nothing.

LAWRENCE DEUTSCH
Holmes, N.Y., July 12, 2003
•

To the Editor:
Jon Pareles (Critic's Notebook, July 12) appears to exonerate Bob Dylan of plagiarism of Dr. Junichi Saga's 1991 book "Confessions of a Yakuza" since Bob Dylan was neither purporting to present original research nor setting unbroken stretches of the original book to music. This defense simply does not pass the "sniff test."
When someone takes a number of passages, virtually verbatim, from someone else's work (especially a work that is obscure or difficult to trace), fails to give attribution and represents them as original thoughts, that's plagiarism by even the most liberal definition.
Bob Dylan's brilliance aside, for Mr. Pareles to rename it a "collage" doesn't make it any less plagiarism.

CORY FRANKLIN
Chicago, July 12, 2003

...and when the last word fell silent upon the crowds ears, did anyone hear what the other heard.
How the last word was sold by the first idea to pay its debt for the second thought?

<img src="http://www.arlo.net/ubb/smilies/peace.gif" width=16 height=16>

Here is the thread your on about Joe.

Thanks for locating that, Beverley! I'm kinda surprised that nobody posted "the list" way back when, but I had posted it elsewhere & will paste it below, in the interests of Arlonet having an accurate historical record. I originally had found it at the Wall Street Journal web site---of all places! There were 12 althogether, but I omitted the 12th one, thinking it was kind of a stretch, that by the time the guy found 11, he was just looking for stuff that wasn't there. Anyways, here it is:
______________________________


"My old man would sit there like a feudal lord." (Confessions of a Yakuza, page 6)

"My old man, he's like some feudal lord
Got more lives than a cat"
("Floater")

***

"If it bothers you so much," she'd say, " why don't you just shove off?" (Confessions of a Yakuza, page 9)

"Juliet said back to Romeo,
'Why don't you just shove off
If it bothers you so much?'"
("Floater")

***

"My mother...was the daughter of a wealthy farmer...(she) died when I was eleven...I heard that my father was a traveling salesman who called at the house regularly, but I never met him. (My uncle) was a nice man, I won't forget him...After my mother died, I decided it'd be best to go and try my luck there." (Confessions of a Yakuza, pages 57-58 )

"My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer
My father was a traveling salesman, I never met him
When my mother died, my uncle took me in -- he ran a funeral parlor
He did a lot of nice things for me and I won't forget him"
("Po' Boy")

***

"Break the roof in!" he yelled.. (He) splashed kerosene over the floor and led a fuse from it outside." (Confessions of a Yakuza, page 63)

"Yes, I'm leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift
Gonna break the roof in -- set fire to the place as a parting gift"
("Summer Days")

***

"I won't come anymore if it bothers you." (Confessions of a Yakuza, page 139)

"Some things are too terrible to be true
I won't come here no more if it bothers you"
("Honest With Me")

***

"D'you think I could call myself a yakuza if I couldn't stand up to some old businessman?"
(Confessions of a Yakuza, page 141)

"The fog is so thick that you can't even spy the land
What good are you anyway, if you can't stand up to some old businessman?"
("Summer Days")

***

" ...I heard he caused some kind of trouble that put him on bad terms with the younger men.. A good bookie makes all the difference in a gambling joint-- it's up to him whether a session comes alive or falls flat.. But even kicking him out wasn't as easy as that.. So I decided to wait a while and see how it worked out.. But age doesn't matter in that business.... Age by itself just doesn't carry any weight. (Confessions of a Yakuza, pages 153- 155)

"The old men 'round here, sometimes they get on
Bad terms with the younger men,
But old, young , age don't carry weight
It doesn't matter in the end" ("Floater")

"Things come alive or they fall flat" ("Floater")

"It's not always easy kicking someone out
Gotta wait a while - it can be an unpleasant task" ("Floater")

***

"Actually, though, I'm not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded." (Confessions of a Yakuza, page 158 )

"I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound
I've seen enough heartaches and strife" ("Floater")

***

"Tears or not, though, that was too much to ask.." (Confessions of a Yakuza, page 182)

"Sometimes somebody wants you to give something up
And tears or not, it's too much to ask"
("Floater")

***

"Just because she was in the same house didn't mean we were living together as man and wife...I don't know how it looked to other people, but I never even slept with her--not once." (Confessions of a Yakuza, page 208 )

"Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months
Don't know how it looked to other people
I never slept with her even once"
("Lonsesome Day Blues")

***

"There was nothing sentimental about him--it didn't bother him at all that some of his pals had been killed. (Confessions of a Yakuza, page 243)

"My captain, he's decorated -- he's well schooled and he's skilled
He's not sentimental -- don't bother him at all
How many of his pals have been killed"
("Lonesome Day Blues")