Who Owns This?
“Whoever thinks an idea can be copyrighted has already forgotten its source”
I mean, the founders of our country had a good intention when they established copyright laws and patents so creators could benefit from their work. But the legal thicket that has grown up around those concepts is now blocking and stifling creativity. And the protection goes on way too long in time. Also, the sense of ownership and entitlement of individual and corporate creators has grown totally out of proportion.
Culture is a group effort, not a business.
Let’s pare down the issue, for the sake of simplicity, and pretend for a moment, we are a culture with only an oral tradition. As soon as one teller speaks the story, it belongs to the whole tribe. The whole tribe then keeps the story alive. The story teller does not own the story. The hearers now own it.
All art, all music, all literature stands on the shoulders of the previous creator’s work. Without the progenitors, the later work has no context, so no meaning. It is a conversation in the medium of time. A conversation is worthless without a back and forth interaction. Otherwise you are just whistling into the wind, as we might say. Or the tree that falls in the forest that no one hears.
Speaking of these stories and aphorisms, indeed speaking of language, and of speaking, itself, this is, by definition, a shared creation. Ongoing. Where is the meaning or use of a language that is not shared with other speakers? Who first came up with this or that theme, this or that saying? After a while, it is simply a part of all of us. That is its power, and its value.
How about if I were to claim ownership of a letter in the alphabet? Every time you speak a word with my letter, or write it, you have to pay me royalties. Laughable? We can all buy letters, if we have enough money, lawyers, and power, I say. But soon, no one would allowed to write or talk! That is why I now own the whole alphabet. And every work of humans on Earth. And the sun. All of it is mine, but it is not all mine. It is yours too. Each cultural creation is a statement, nested in the context of all that has gone before it, back to the ancestors of the ancestors of the ancestors.
There is an awesome natural food store in Eugene named Sundance. Once upon a time, the legal team of the film festival that also goes by that name, approached the store demanding they drop the name Sundance because they claimed they “owned” it! As it happens, the store had been in business longer than the film festival had been in existence, so the greedy lawyers were thwarted. But the question remained, why did a group that takes its name from a sacred dance of Native Americans think they could buy such a so called property in the first place? The sun dance itself was created as a kind of painful magical self sacrifice ritual designed to make the invading Europeans go away, so, that’s rather ironic! But wait! We all live under the same sun. It is The Sun, the only daystar of the planet. Do not all of us descend from ancestors who danced under the same sun?!
Wait, but…who am I to think this? Best question yet! When inspiration and new ideas flow out of the heads and hands of us creatives, where does it come from? Is not the “original” idea, work of art, etc, what is sought and praised? Other work being dismissed as “derivative”? News flash: It is ALL derivative, folks! It is a natural unfolding and blooming created by the conditions and ripeness of the moment. It is true what they say: that there are no new ideas, just different ways to say them. You update them to the style of the times, to the changing language of the day.
There is also the well known phenomenon of several unacquainted scientists or artists coming up with the same inspiration at once. Why? Again, there is a ripening effect. A shared atmospheric meme space. These discoveries don’t just appear, they have context, and a long development stage preceding them.
It is only the egotism of immature individuals that wants to separate out the part from the whole. It is the child who picks off the flower head without even the stem to hold it up in a vase. The fruit that drops from the tree of culture or science into your hand is only the latest edition. It comes from the All. And the Forever.
You do not exclusively own the thing you made. And you surely did not make yourself. We are all connected, to a whole that goes back so far no one can remember, and is so big, no one can conceive of its enormity. So let’s loosen our boundaries, share, and build a cultural space for each other, with each other.
“Whoever thinks an idea can be copyrighted has already forgotten its source”- (doesn’t matter, right?)
