Of love and copy-paste eulogies

A group of my former colleagues at the Philippine Collegian are currently working on a posthumous book project in honor of a dear friend who passed away recently, brutally murdered by an assailant who is still at large. Vincent Jan Rubio (UP Philippine Studies batch 2002), a journalist and fictionist who had participated in several national writers' workshops and won quite a few literary contests, and who was my successor as editor of the Collegian's Kultura section, had been planning to publish his first book at the time of his shocking and early death.

A handful of the alumni involved in the project are lawyers and law students, so we were assigned to oversee legal matters such as copyright, as well as contracts with the chosen publishing firm. For the past three months, VJ's friends have been painstakingly collating and encoding his published and unpublished literary works, some of which have been posted online, on his blog or the websites of the publications that he contributed to. We wouldn't know anymore, however, how many people his written work has reached, how many links have been made to his essays with or without his permission, or how many times his poems have been reposted on the Web. It is a source of small consolation, though, that the creativity and talent of this admirable person may yet live on, even in cyberspace.

Perhaps we could more easily have made a website, and we haven't decided yet if there will also be an electronic version of VJ's first and last book. But aside from the quaintly analog thinking among writers (no matter how many novels you publish on the Internet, one's first printed book is still considered THE rite of passage into the literary establishment), we wish to create something that, had he been alive, our friend would have delighted in holding in his hands and proudly showing to his family. It is not just that we are concerned about copyright violations, though indeed, I would not want to see VJ's work of a lifetime plagiarized or the proceeds from it stolen from his estate. It is more about remembrance and permanence, of a sense of certainty in the midst of an ephemeral existence. Our labor of love, in this era of copy-paste verses and instant art, may be a poor tribute, but human memory often needs such tangible markers. Digital or paper-based, this milestone in a writer's career deserves respect through proper attribution: the simple act of giving credit where credit is due. This, I believe, is what intellectual property rights should really be about -- and it is a value that, if we are to maintain basic human courtesy in this age of high technology, should be commonly shared by all sojourners in the cyber-world.