Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
That culture has always been about the stories we tell each other, no matter the medium they are told in.
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One thing I agree, we have always telling stories each other. But I do disagree to that the medium doesn't matter.
We verbally tell stories each other every day, hardly anyone would want a payment. "Hey do you want to know what happened here yesterday? That cost 'ya 50 cents!"... Some stories lived on for generation only by verbal reproduction (fables) and a lot of "knowledge" is inside a given group of humans in a rather implicit kind.
However it takes considerable amount work to transform this implicit stories, emotions, and also ideas you picked up into a cohorent text. Into a nice book. Thats a work you don't do when you just tell somebody a story you drink a coffee with...
The idea of copyright is IMHO to grant rights explicity at this point of "transition". Transition from implicit casual stories, dreams, thoughts into an explicit nicely worked out script. In both worlds (one is implicit verbal, group knowledge versus the other written texts) a story can live quite freely on and on, without considerable effort. In one people just interact, in the other you can just copy (now in the digital age with zero costs). The problem is still the transition of one world into another. And this is the point copyright comes into the place. The one who makes the work to transit a story, is the one who gets the copyright on the written side of things...
And yes creative work is "bricolage". That is you take a lot of stuff and rearrange it a new way, and maybe add a few percent of really original things. The key of beeing seen as ingenious is to keep your sources secret (I think this comes from Einstein). Okay this is so. But still this bricolage *is* work, and its a kind of transition of information and it still is not happening from itself if there isn't any incentive. I don't see why anybody should not be granted a copyright just some parts of what he rearrenged where public knowledge before.
Its like saying, you don't own this house, you took the bricks from our common stone pit where we all take our bricks for building a house...