Z:gnu-www-ja-copyright-versus-community-2000--f67e5b-=26ldquo;How dare anyone change/en

&ldquo;How dare anyone change a line of this?&rdquo; On the other hand you have the folk process which shows that a series of people sequentially modifying the work or maybe even in parallel and then comparing versions can produce something tremendously rich, and not only beautiful songs and short poems, but even long epics have been produced in this way, and there was a time back before the mystique of the artist as creator, semi-divine figure was so powerful when even great writers reworked stories that had been written by others. Some of the plays of Shakespeare involve stories that were taken from other plays written often a few decades before. If today's copyright laws had been in effect they would have called Shakespeare a quote pirate unquote for writing some of his great work and so of course you would have had the other authors saying