Bob Dylan stands accused of “unattributed quotation”. A dozen of his lines closely echo Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza, a memoir of gangster life in Japan. I can’t resist the Schadenfreude: a few years ago I wanted to quote a pair of Dylan’s lines, but his agents demanded so many thousands of dollars that my publishers jibbed. I’ll quote them now and see if he has the chutzpah to sue me:

It’s very nice to be in Mozambique,
With all the couples dancing cheek to cheek.

To avoid the charges, I cut out all but two words — “very nice” — to which I thought Dylan would be unlikely to claim exclusive rights. I didn’t risk quoting “dancing cheek to cheek” in case I incurred rights fees payable to the estate of Irving Berlin.

The phrases Dylan is supposed to have filched seem hackneyed or trivial: “Cool and forgiving ... like a feudal lord ... too much to ask.” Only silly-season news editors can wax righteous about the theft of gangsters’ prose: that, presumably, is why the story spread over three columns of The New York Times. But it does raise questions about what intellectual property means today, who pays for it and how much: that, presumably, is why the same story made the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

All over the world, hard noses are prying into plagiarism. CD-makers seek new sanctions against samplers. Licensing agencies comb the web in the hope of finding something to charge someone for. Universities devise disciplinary procedures for students who rip rubbish off the net. Copy-and-paste culture threatens creativity and coherence. Intellectuals — whose words are our livelihoods — are trapped between two mutually contradictory consequences. On the one hand, we send for the thought police and clamour for tighter laws — while feeling guilty about the illiberalism and being sullied by the money. Meanwhile, cutting-edge thinkers (and The New York Times) cite new technology as justification for a free for all. There is now no such thing as an author — just work emerging from the interplay of reading and writing. Text is never definitive. Every recycling renews what it repeats. Originality is dead.

This doctrine self-demonstrates unoriginality, for the web has accentuated an old problem, not created a new one. Everything worthwhile in the arts arises from tradition. Allusion and unattributed quotation are part of the game writers and readers play together: the pleasure of spotting them is a reward of reading. A work which interrupted every echo with a footnote would be a nightmare of erudition.

Jorge Luis Borges — the master of modern storytelling — perfectly satirised the misrepresentation of plagiarism as art in his fiction of Pierre Mesnard, a writer whose life’s work was to copy, word for word, a single chapter of Don Quixote. To its admirers, this achievement was creative: no one had done it before; its effect was new, because a chapter in isolation is stunningly unintelligible; and it was sublimely artistic, because it was pointless. At the same time, the story disclosed a subtle critical truth: there can hardly be a novel of the past four centuries which is not indebted in some measure to a work as influential as Don Quixote.

In the realm of ideas, there is little new nowadays to protect. Most of our thinking runs in grooves laid down by sages more than three thousand years ago. Ideas we mistake for modern are often even older: our capacity for thinking has not grown since human minds evolved, no later than the Ice Age. In a book due out in September, I tell the history of ideas without the usual prejudice in favour of modernity: readers will get more than a quarter of the way through it before reaching the Ancient Greeks. It is only by rehashing old ideas that we have made the faint, feeble progress detectable in the history of thought.

When we borrow a line or an idea or even a word — if, along with it, we seize a peculiar resonance — we are not, therefore, purloining its originality: it almost certainly had none, anyway. What we owe the author of it is simply the tribute due to anyone we borrow anything from: the courtesy of respect. This means handling with care, as with any borrowed goods. It also means paying compensation if what we borrow is part of someone else’s means of life — the tools of a trade, the source of earnings. This is a moral obligation. I hate enforcing moral obligations by law: every such law is a measure of our failure to construct a society which breeds virtue. But it’s nobler than most laws, which normally have no moral purpose and serve only conventions, convenience or sectional interests.

Dylan’s errant album is called Love and Theft. That seems a revealingly appropriate title. You imitate what you admire: therefore you should be prepared to pay for it, albeit not necessarily at the rates Dylan’s agents demand for quotations from his work. So long live plagiarism, as long as it is paid for. To borrow someone’s phrase without attribution, it is a pretty sincere form of flattery.

The author teaches at Queen Mary, University of London

Times Recommends

• Graveyard of empires could claim more careers
• Would you live on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall?
• At last we’re getting our heads out of the sand