Intellectual Property Belongs to the Author
Not to the Audience
It has become popular in recent decades, to claim that works of literature (and also art, novels, films, and music) belong ultimately not to the creators but to the many fans who enjoy them. Originally, the idea that work belonged to the audience wasn’t meant quite literally, but over time it has come to mean exactly that, because human beings are rarely comfortable with a halfhearted embrace of a concept and so gradually they will go from timid endorsers to full-throated enthusiasts.
A cousin of this notion that art doesn’t belong to the person who created it, is the idea that all interpretation is valid. Most people still do not mean this literally, because on its face it is absurd. If it is meant literally, then the The Merchant of Venice is about alien abduction, Huckleberry Finn is a prophetic work about the Cold War, Persuasion is about the Peloponnesian War, and so on.
Admittedly, if we deconstruct words until they signify nothing and find we arrive at the truth that there is no ground of grounds and all is interpretation, then quite literally it is equally valid to say that Huckleberry Finn is about slavery as it is to say that Huckleberry Finn is a science fiction novel set on Zorg IV in the year 4576768 B.C.1
But that is absurd and few people are willing to go that far. Most people, however, are willing to go so far as to say that different interpretations can be valid, which may be true. Many people are even willing to go so far as to say that – all interpretation aside – books belong to the readers.