Our borrowing culture

One of the things that most exasperates me about the copyright industry’s crazed drive towards the propertization of everything is how self-defeating it would be if it is allowed to go unchecked. Every cultural artefact that our civilisation has valued is the result of an artist’s conscious and unconscious borrowing from the works of others. Lock down the borrowing and you lock down our culture. Why can’t people see this? It’s not as though it’s a difficult idea. (I tried to express it in my rant to the Westminster Media Forum.)

I found a lovely phrase in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (one of my favourite books), which expresses the same idea beautifully. “Masterpieces”, she writes, “are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”