My first post for Publishers Weekly is live at PWxyz. Meet Imaginary Bruce Willis. Some excerpts:
Last month, the Sunday Times of London reported that Bruce Willis was planning to sue Apple. The actor, the newspaper explained, was furious that iTunes’s terms of service would keep him from leaving his music collection to his daughters when he died. The story was soon revealed to be somewhere between fantasy and fabrication. But even before a five-word tweet from his Willis’ wife (“it’s not a true story”) definitively refuted the article’s claims, the news had gone viral, spreading far beyond the usual haunts of fatuous celebrity journalism. Something in the rage of Imaginary Bruce Willis had touched a nerve. …
Radin’s point is that ownership matters. It matter for human reasons, for humane reasons. When your houseguests browse your bookshelves, that, too, is socializing, along with the cocktails and conversation. Making a mixtape is an intimate act. Having a thing sitting in your home, a heavy inconvenient thing made of dead trees or polymerized petrochemicals, is a kind of exclusion: it ensures that no one can take that piece of art away. But it is also offers a kind of inclusion: to lend a book is to invite a friend to the delights it contains.