If you want to keep your art, whatever it is, shut in your house and just do it for your own sake then that’s fine, but as soon as you put it out into the world people are going to create their own meanings for it and have their own interactions with it – you can’t and shouldn’t have any right to demand to influence this interaction.

So I am not saying that you surrender authorship or give up all right to determine how the work is used, but there is still a degree to which this is true and necessary.

The examples you cite are a bit different to what I’m talking about, too. One is simply a direct misquote, a lie, as I never said that. Flatly misrepresenting someone’s position is just dishonest, but it’s not a question of copyright or ownership.

Lifting the review wholesale is also simply plagiarism. A more appropriate analogy would be simply reprinting my reviews as Song, by Toad reviews in their paper and then selling that paper. This is almost exactly analagous to what we do on music blogs: we use other people’s stuff and give them full credit. For the most part the arguments are the same too: up to a point it would be hugely beneficial to me to have my reviews printed verbatim and credited in The Sun, but there would come a point where I would have to start to ask myself why they were making money from my writing and I, irrespective of credit or audience received, was not. Where that point lies though is anyone’s guess.

Here’s another example: one of my readers recently changed his Facebook profile picture to the Toad sketch I have in the blog header. My initial reaction was ‘Hey, that’s mine!’ but if I’d used an EH Shepard sketch myself would I think I was doing something bad? Probably not. There’s no credit or benefit to me and no attribution, but do I have the right to ask him to stop? I don’t know, but it would feel a bit weird doing it and I don’t think it would be right, somehow.

I am not saying there is a dogmatically right view on this, but an artist’s work is not exclusively their own from the second they invite other people to appreciate it: it becomes, to a limited and undefined degree, a shared thing at that point. To what extent? I don’t know, I’m still trying to get my head around that.