Blogging in my opinion is an exercise in putting things together much more than it is about recording something or informing people or being a commentator. People say that there is nothing new under the sun, and that all the great things are just imitations or reworkings of what has gone before. In a sense, this is fine; chefs aren't expected to be able to procure and prepare the myriad ingredients they use from scratch; likewise sculptors aren't required to make their own marble or smelt their own steel. Indeed, there is an art movement that is all about mining great insights from mundane pieces that were obviously designed for another purpose entirely. We call this prospecting for gold in the dirt of the world harvesting externalities; an externality in general being anything that is a direct consequence of another's actions and not that of your own. An externality that adds a cost to you could be called a negative externality, while a positive one means an externality that gives a benefit - a definition that makes the latter somewhat indistinguishable from the function of grace, to my mind.
There are those who would say that benefiting from the discarded seeds of the fruits of another man's labor is wrong, but I suppose that is because in large part people don't realize how hard it is to make good come out of the refuse of others. For it to grow, the seed from the core of the fruit that was thrown away still needs to experience the same kind of care and attention that was given to it by he who grew the tree from which the fruit came. But since the one who finds the seed might not know anything about agriculture or the special needs of that breed of plant, leaving aside the fact that the seed might already be rotted, their effort is greater. They may have to try harder, at least until a better way is found. And that better way they may even inevitably have to create themselves.
Making something from scratch, giving birth to something form nowhere, is a process from ignorance to realizing something and then realizing the process by which one can actualize the original realization. Take the wheel, for example; imagine that for millions of years people have been carrying things and moving to different places all their lives. Imagine that at some point quite a few of these people thought that there must be a better way to get things moved from here to there. Thinking that there ought to be a better way isn't the same as knowing there is a better way or knowing what that way even is. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb so eloquently put it in his book on black swans, knowledge is asymmetrical. It's not a linear progression n, if anything it's exponential. It must have been some time before we finally blundered into using logs under flat pieces of wood, and even longer before we thought about outfitting a log with an axle. Think about the odds for that. Someone had to have thought up that one implementation, out of all the others that were dung. He not only had to have reasoned out the design, he also would have had to invent a whole new paradigm to even be able to justify why the design was optimal. Sounds unreasonable, doesn't it?
It's far more likely that the innovation of the wheel was realized through a process of harvesting externalities. At some points there would have been trial-and-error, a playing around of what people knew or observed. At other points someone would have copied someone else, or maybe they would have taken the state of the art for that time and taken the ideas beyond what their originators/keepers could dream. That model is more practical, less resource-intensive, and more reliable; that is, sooner or later humanity would have gotten lucky after leveraging the fascination of a lot more people than just the one supposed "genius."
To me free culture is about two things: one, our ability to create and play around with what's in our heads should not be limited by outside parties; and two, the power of the human race to innovate, what distinguishes us from anything else on Earth, should be given free rein if we want to actually better our existence. Non-scientists can find cures to incurable diseases, don't you know; and rappers can make mix tapes even while shot up and recuperating. K-pop groups can be good for more than the occasional performance. And on it goes. For these reasons, there is opposition among its proponents about the whole intellectual property system, in particular the copyright system.
Following is a group of articles that address the issue, and which has largely informed my thinking:
Cory Doctorow - Just because something has value doesn't mean it has a price
Nina Paley - Credit is Due (The Attribution Song)
Nina Paley - Culture is Anti-Rivalrous
Nina Paley - Addendum: Why do I say Culture is not a Commons?
Now, as I understand it the intellectual property system was created with the intent of fostering innovation. The idea was that society sought to reward the innovator by making the obstacles to profiting from his idea less steep; but obviously no one would benefit if he had a monopoly over the innovation. This is the reason for the copyright/patent being of an arbitrary timeframe, but the system has been abused by others having their copyrights extended way too long, or collecting other people's coyrights/patents. The problem is that after having some of these innovations out in the open for so long, they've crept up into people's collective consciousness. These innovations are part of people's lives now, are fixtures of their existence, and are even part of how they think and see everything. Putting a tax on these things has the unfortunate result of making other forms of innovation harder - innovation is hard enough without having to innovate a way to pay off everybody who might come after you because of a (sometimes non-existent) connection to their work. Instead of attempting something true to their temperament, what happens more often than not is something equivalent to imposed censorship.
One may ask, whether this may be too general. Let's say a novel referenced a character from an established work, something like fan fiction that was later published. Perhaps omitting the character might be feasible if it was just a couple of lines that referenced him, but what if he was central to the plot? What if in the original novel this character was just a bit player? What if this later work was a satire or parody? What if, the very act of "protecting" an idea with copyright rendered it stale and uninspired, good only for a cash cow? Clearly the line for these edge cases needs to be clearer.
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