Creativity--A Primer
by John Aquino on 01/24/12
As far as the copyright law is concerned, the threshold for creativity in a work is very low. And yet, creativity is very important to the author as well as to intellectual property law.
It is the creative works that are the subject of copyright disputes, after all. Copyright litigation is often focused on the creative process and when the idea became a work of authorship that is protected by the copyright laws in the United States and its treaty nations.
I doubt if one can say one ever understands the creative process. But one does appreciate it.
I remember when I was just starting out as an editor. I was managing editor for Music Educators Journal, then the official magazine of the Music Educators National Conference. The editor, the late Malcolm Bessom, wanted to do a special issue on creativity, and he sent me a scholarly journal that had published an article on creativity by Steve Allen.
For those who are not of a certain age, Steve Allen was a Renaissance Man in the 20th century. He was a pianist, he wrote music, lyrics, books. He was the first host of television’s the Tonight Show. Allen is credited with having written 14,000 songs in his career. In this article, Allen discussed the creative process.
I kept the article for the longest time, but at some point lost it, so this is from memory. (Allen may well have used the material in the article in one of his many books, but I just haven’t found it.) To begin his discussion of creativity, Allen described a much discussed stunt in which he was the principal actor. Because he wrote songs and wrote them quickly, some entertainer—I though Allen said it was the comedian Shecky Greene but I have read others say it was the singer Julius LaRosa—challenged Allen to a contest. Greene or LaRosa bet Allen that he could not sit in the window of a music store with a piano and wrote 50 songs a day for a week. Allen took the bet and won it.
In the article, Allen confessed that he didn’t have to take a day to write the 50 songs. It only took him an hour!
And if you know Allen’s work, this is not a surprising admission. Allen used to perform a segment on his television shows where he would ask the audience to shout out numbers with each number representing a note on the scale. I remember once, after others had shouted 1, 3, 2, 4, someone shouted 9, which would make the melody suddenly jump up the scale. Allen just smiled, nodded at the band and produced a melody from those five notes. Among other styles of music, Allen was trained in jazz improvisation and how to do riffs on existing melodies. He utilized this technique in doing this songwriting segment on his tv shows and, surely, when he wrote 50 songs a day in the window of the music store.
Allen used the story as an example of creativity. But then the somewhat sad but necessary acknowledgement comes. Allen wrote14,000 songs, but how many of them are remembered today? Allen wrote “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” a standard that you can still hear in cabarets and piano bars today. He wrote the lyrics to the music George Duning composed for the 1955 movie Picnic, which became known, as a song, as “Theme from Picnic.” There may be one or two others that some reading this can remember, but not that many.
I once heard someone compare Allen to the baseball player Moe Berg. He was only an average player for the Chicago White Sox, Boston Red Sox, and Washington Senators. But, a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School, Berg appeared on the radio quiz show Information, Please! and was recruited during World War Two to spy for the OSS and after the war for the CIA. Sadly, he spent the last two decades of his life unemployed and living with relatives.
A fellow ballplayer once said of him, “Mel could speak a dozen languages, but he couldn’t hit in any of them!”
There’s a difference between creativity and knowledge, between creativity and a certain facility.
Creativity is a process that ends in a spark that ends in the expression of something in a new and different way. And even that expression is not as creative as I would like it to be.
In intellectual property, the works people fight over have that spark. Usually, the work that someone claims was infringed by a best-selling novel or prize-winning play or movie, doesn’t have the spark.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino. All posts do not constitute legal advice and are the opinions of the author presented for educational purposes.
