The Reality of Copyright

David Shields writes in Reality Hunger:

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

Or at least you might think he did, until you check out the appendix of citations in the back and find it was said by Wlliam Gibson in Wired.

I read Reality Hunger with a thumb planted in the appendix to check the source of each section as I finished it, even those of a sentence or less in length—the exact opposite of the Shields’ intention, I know, but it’s how I was raised.