Few things are as deeply rooted in human nature as the idea of property. One of the first words a child learns is “mine,” and shortly after that, “more.” Some children never grow out of it, which is why we have so many billionaires.
Our whole civilization is based on the right to have and hold property. The eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that property is the source of all our inequalities, disputes, and wars. Even a backyard fence or a national frontier can arouse intense proprietary feelings. This possessive instinct laid the foundation for a whole alternative political tradition, communism, that rejected the idea of property altogether. You may recall that this proved to be the most unpopular program in the entire history of politics. We love our property, and our entire legal system is designed to protect it. Even the Chinese communists are capitalists now, although they pretend not to be.
Far more subtle is the notion of intellectual property that was conceived in the nineteenth century and has been causing confusion ever since. Intellectual property law is designed to protect the creators of intangible things like scientific inventions, books, music, and so on. Before such laws existed, there was little or no protection. Shakespeare stole most of his historical plots directly from the histories of Holinshed. Composers like Mozart and Haydn had their music shamelessly copied all over Europe, and Charles Dickens’s books were reprinted in America without permission or payment. Nobody felt embarrassed by this. It was taken for granted.
Now we have copyright laws and armies of lawyers to defend intellectual property, although stealing other people’s ideas is as popular as ever. Almost every week, we read another high-profile case from the world of academia or publishing. Authors are routinely accused of lifting chunks of their works from previously published works. Politicians steal whole paragraphs of speeches from more gifted performers, and even whole ideologies dressed up as something else. There have been reports of preachers copying sermons from other preachers, who in turn probably copied from the Bible.
Intellectual property is hard to defend or even define in the Internet age. Once ideas or words or images are out on the web, they effectively become public property, whatever the law says. Whole orchestral performances and even operas can be squeezed onto smartphones, along with galleries of pictures. A library of books may become no more than a few weightless kilobytes on a tablet. Intellectual property has always been easier to steal than the more solid kind. Now, much of it is dematerialized to the point where it is almost asking to be stolen.
Intellectual property laws are intended to defend new and especially original ideas. But there is not much new under the sun, especially when it comes to sermons and political speeches. It’s all been thought and said before and will be thought and said again tomorrow. Virtually all our culture from the time of the ancient Greeks consists of borrowings and repetitions. Most movies, novels, and art are plucked straight from the universal human storybook. Mark Twain was fond of declaring, “I have never had an original thought,” but few writers are so honest. We owe everything to the few great thinkers throughout history who really were original, and whose intellectual property we appropriate without a word of recognition every day. Without them, we would have no culture at all.
