Criticism
In an essay entitled "Against intellectual property", Brian Martin cites Brilliant as a "professional epigrammatist" who has been known to threaten legal action in order to display his market precedence over legally owned fragments of human language, thus managing to reveal one of the many absurdities behind "intellectual property", namely its ability to limit the free use and dissemination of human expression. When Brilliant finds someone who has "used" one of his epigrams, he contacts them demanding a payment for breach of copyright.
For instance, television journalist David Brinkley wrote a book, Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion, the title of which he attributed to a friend of his daughter. Brilliant contacted Brinkley about copyright violation and Random House, Brinkley's publisher, paid Brilliant $1000 without contesting the issue.
In a separate 1979 case, a company copied two of Brilliant's phrases -- "I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent" and "I have abandoned my search for truth and am now looking for a good fantasy"—and altered a third phrase, all for sale on t-shirt transfers. The district court acknowledged that the phrases were distinguished by conciseness, cleverness, and pointed observation, ruling that they were protected by copyright.
Read more about this topic: Ashleigh Brilliant
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