Where is the Love? Appropriating Quantum Mechanics Lectures it seems…

Love Communications made an ad for Ricoh copiers featuring two models chatting backstage:

Model 1: But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense - if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves - then what is it about?
Model 2: Well, from my perspective, it’s about information, probabilities, and observables, and how they relate to each other.
Model 1: That’s interesting!

Thing is though, this dialogue is remarkably similar (minus the “That’s interesting” bit) to one of Scott Aaronson’s lectures:

But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense — if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves, or particles — then what is it about? From my perspective, it’s about information and probabilities and observables, and how they relate to each other.

Scott relays this appropriation on his blog with an invite to his readers:

For almost the first time in my life, I’m at a loss for words. I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know which of 500,000 possible jokes to make. Help me, readers. Should I be flattered? Should I be calling a lawyer?

While many commenters suggested a laugh and enjoy it approach, from what I could tell anyway, just as many were suggesting legal action. Seriously.

I joined in the fray with a comment of my own:

Sure the ad company was sloppy and they SHOULD have asked for permission prior to using the snippet. But what’s there really to compensate? It’s a few sentences out of a much longer work.

Sometimes I wonder how much we actually lose as a community when even the smallest thing is reduced to a monetary value in this increasingly user-pays world.

As far as compensation goes legally, it would first come down to the substantiality of the excerpt and if there were any fair dealing exceptions. What a court will decide is substantial is always going to depend on the work and thus be uncertain.

But I think the more important question is what does the community consider should be the law? On this issue, I found the knee-jerk reaction of many of the readers to sue really worrying.

It made me wonder what space is there in the world for uses that are not entirely fair and wholesome but maybe should still be tolerated. After all, if you reduce the boundaries to ensure that that marginally unfair thing is protected against, you will undoubtedly include many fairer uses along with it.

If it was just one sentence, instead of two would it have made a difference? Judging from the response in this case, I’d say probably not. So then, can we really say that we should be able to own, extract rent from and control the use of one sentence? I find that possibility incredibly oppressive. However, and I can’t help playing devil’s advocate even to myself, suppose that sentence was a haiku or some similar bit of poetry - would that make a difference?

Reminds me of a story I heard from a literary agent. One of their authors wanted to quote a line in a song but the permissions route looked arduous (and expensive) so they had another of their poets write the line into a poem which was published and then duly quoted gratis (except maybe for a bottle of good wine). So the appropriation in the poem was accepted as not a copyright infringement but it was expected that the quote would have been. Hmmm… strange but true.