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marmar

(76,985 posts)
Tue May 8, 2012, 08:04 AM May 2012

The Alchemy of Creativity: How cooperation boosts art, science and everything else

from OnTheCommons.org:



The Alchemy of Creativity
How cooperation boosts art, science and everything else

May 6, 2012 | by Brad Lichtenstein


Excerpted from On The Commons’ book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons


The founders of the United States embraced the commons when it came to ideas. They understood that the best fresh ideas are generated out of previous ideas, and therefore should remain in the public domain (a cultural commons). Indeed, copyright and patent law in the early days of the nation expressly aimed to move new cultural creations into the public domain as soon as possible. In 1790, copyrights lasted fourteen years with a chance to renew for another fourteen. Today, after passage of the 1998 Sonny Bono Act by Congress, copyrights last for seventy years beyond the life of the original creator, or 120 years from creation in the case of corporate ownership.

It’s only very recently that the rise of intellectual property law has tipped the scales toward private ownership of every conceivable aspect of what we create, from breakthroughs in science and other academic fields to traditions in art and pop culture. Today people are attempting to claim exclusive rights to spices, healing herbs, or yoga poses that have been used for centuries. Compare that to Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of the U.S. Patent Office, who refused to patent the famous Franklin stove. Why? Because he said he was merely building on ideas of stoves that came before. “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,” he wrote, “we should be glad to serve others by any inventions of ours.”

Novelist Jonathan Lethem documented how the free exchange of ideas works in art in an essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The Ecstasy of Influence”, in which he traced patterns of borrowed influences through music (Delta bluesman Son House to Chicago bluesman Muddy Waters to British rock bands), animation (without Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show), literature (Ovid’s telling of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe is the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which in turns was the inspiration for West Side Story). To prove his point about the mutually collaborative nature of new ideas (as opposed to the “eureka” theory, in which ideas are concocted out of thin air), he strove to footnote the influence of every line of his essay.

The Scientific Commons

A great example of a cultural commons from the field of science is the Human Genome Project, a massive collective effort on the part of scientists around the globe to decode all human genes. New information discovered in the project was shared for all to use and to improve upon in their own research. The project was competing with a private venture that sought to sell the data that was produced. The private venture didn’t succeed in decoding the genome ahead of the Human Genome Project, and thankfully so, because the high cost of their data may have stymied many subsequent scientific and medical advances. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/alchemy-creativity



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The Alchemy of Creativity: How cooperation boosts art, science and everything else (Original Post) marmar May 2012 OP
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