Copyright and The Sea of Stories

Doc Searls explains that Supreme Court ruled against Eldred because copyright is conventionally understood to be a form of simple property.
Here’s a gorgeous quote from a Salman Rushdie novel explaining why the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The Ocean of the Streams of Story… was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity… these were the Streams of Story… each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories… all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented and could be find here…
And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

Stories and music and movies aren’t just property. They are part of the ocean of stories that make up our culture.
The founding fathers defined copyright as giving a monopoly to content creators for a limited time. After that, stories should return to the ocean from which they came, to help combine and create new stories.
from Haroun and the Sea of Stories

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