Copyright and Creativity
When Knowledge Stopped Being Inheritance and Became Territory
Civilization once passed ideas forward like a torch. Somewhere along the way, someone decided torches needed a licensing agreement.
There is a client who comes in every few weeks — a musician, though in Brasschaat that covers a range from conservatory-trained to “I play guitar at Christmas and the dog no longer hides under the bed.” One afternoon, between the second rinse and the final blow-dry, she told me her band had received a copyright strike for posting a video online. For their own song. Which borrowed a chord progression from an older track, which had itself borrowed from a song recorded in 1962 by someone who learned it from someone whose name nobody remembered to write down.
[Switches to serious face.] That story is more amusing as an anecdote than it is as a system. But to understand why the anecdote is the system, you have to start somewhere older.
95years
of US copyright protection after publication
2B+works
licensed under Creative Commons globally
81years
“Happy Birthday” was held under copyright claimText content
6.3%of GDP
from copyright industries in developed economiesText content
We All Arrive Carrying Borrowed Blood
We all arrive carrying borrowed blood. DNA from our parents, gestures from our surroundings, fragments of voices that marked us when we were young. A child hears a singer, watches a hero, admires a teacher, and slowly begins to imitate them. Their mannerisms slip into our posture. Their vocabulary enters our mouth. Their values begin negotiating with our conscience.
As we grow older and the hunger for knowledge expands, we start examining morality and ethics to justify our actions and ambitions. Even that process is borrowed. Our ideas are shaped by the people around us, by education, by culture, by books written by dead minds still speaking through paper and screens.
Every thought we produce carries traces of earlier thoughts.
Mathematics did not appear from nothing. Physics did not emerge fully formed. Architecture was not born in isolation. Each discipline rests on foundations built by others across centuries. Even figures like Archimedes stood on older foundations laid before him. Newton acknowledged it in the most famous sentence in the history of science: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The giants, of course, were standing on other giants. Music is the most honest about this chain — Led Zeppelin borrowed from Robert Johnson, the Rolling Stones borrowed from Muddy Waters, and hip-hop borrowed from everything that came before it and made it new. Human progress has always resembled an endless relay race where each generation grabs the torch, modifies it, and passes it forward.
So in principle, if every idea contains inherited fragments, could inspiration itself become liable for copyright?
“Civilization once treated knowledge as inheritance. Now it treats knowledge as territory. That shift did not happen by accident — it happened by design, in rooms the public was not particularly invited to enter.” — The question this raises is not a legal one. It is a civilizational one.
Hard Work Deserves Protection. This Is Not That.
Do not misunderstand the argument. Hard work deserves protection. Theft exists. People spend years refining skills, building companies, writing books, composing music, or creating inventions. A society that refuses to protect creation eventually suffocates innovation. That principle is sound and genuinely necessary.
But the modern system often feels less concerned with protecting creation and more concerned with controlling access. Governments and institutions produce laws so ambiguous that interpretation becomes a marketplace. Lobbyists influence legislation behind closed doors. Lawyers search for loopholes large enough to drive profit through them. Justice becomes elastic. Meaning bends toward whoever can afford the better argument.
“Happy Birthday to You” — the most sung song in the English language — was held under copyright claim from 1935 until 2016. Eighty-one years. Studios paid royalties every time it appeared on screen. A federal court eventually ruled the claim had no legitimate legal basis. The song had been in the public domain all along. Separately, the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act — nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by critics — extended US copyright by twenty years, largely because the original 1928 Mickey Mouse cartoons were approaching public domain. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, copyright industries now represent approximately 6.3% of GDP in developed economies. The question worth asking is how much of that figure protects original creators — and how much is rent on ideas that always belonged to everyone.
What Are We Becoming?
That contradiction raises a darker question.
Life evolved from a single cell into creatures capable of consciousness, imagination, mathematics, music, poetry, engineering, and art. Across millennia, humanity built pyramids, painted cathedrals, crossed oceans, composed symphonies, and dreamed impossible dreams until they became reality. Civilization advanced because people dared to imagine beyond existing limits — and because the ideas of one generation were available to the next one as raw material, not as property.
Yet during recent decades, society seems increasingly obsessed with multiplying restrictions across every part of life. Every idea becomes property. Every expression requires permission. Every invention risks becoming trapped behind ownership, licensing, patents, or legal threats. Protection slowly transforms into control. The fence keeps moving outward.
Every breakthrough in human history was built on what came before. The question is whether the rules we are building encourage or obstruct the next one. Photo: Unsplash
So the question begins to haunt the future: what are we actually building in the long term? A civilization that encourages creation through shared inheritance of knowledge — or one that slowly fences human imagination into private territory?
The View From a Salon Chair in Brasschaat
I do not have a law degree. I have a salon chair in Brasschaat and enough curiosity to ask questions that law degrees sometimes train people not to ask. What I see from that chair is this: the clients who are most alive — building things, starting over, learning new skills in their sixties — are almost universally the ones who borrow freely. They take technique from one mentor and philosophy from another. They read widely and attribute loosely. The creative inheritance model, in practice, produces more creativity than the creative ownership model. Every time.
There are genuine interests at stake. The novelist’s three years deserve protection. The musician’s catalog deserves protection. Creative Commons, founded in 2001, showed that there is a workable middle ground — two billion works now carry licenses that say “use this, build on this, share this” without abandoning the creator’s rights entirely. Open-source software built on the same principle now runs over ninety percent of the world’s supercomputers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued for thirty years that intellectual property law, applied without restraint, does not produce more creativity — it produces more litigation. These are not the same thing.
We have traced the same fault line in other posts — in our writing on who gets called an expat and who gets called an immigrant, and on who actually benefits when AI enters the classroom. Systems designed to protect the vulnerable tend, over time, to be repurposed to protect the powerful. Copyright law is not unique in this. It is just unusually well-funded.
Because if every generation inherited wisdom from those before it, then perhaps knowledge was never meant to belong entirely to anyone in the first place. Perhaps humanity advanced precisely because ideas were allowed to travel freely through time, changing hands like fire in the dark.
Salon California Journal
The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.
