That, I suspect, is what really rankles those who gnash their teeth when someone lectures them about how art is all about borrowing and exchanging freely. That’s exactly what art is, but our whole edifice of intellectual property law is increasingly designed not to facilitate that borrowing and exchange, but to frustrate it, in the service of protecting the value of incumbent cultural products — the ones owned by corporations. The solution, though, isn’t to build more walls, so that everyone sticks to their cultural knitting. That will just exacerbate existing baleful trends. Rather, what’s needed is to restore the artistic commons, before the only culture we know is one we’ll have to pay a fee to join.
Who’s ‘we’ kemosabe?. This is just brilliant by Noah Millman.