Much of our innovation process, patent laws and intellectual property assumptions are built around this notion which if my memory serves me right goes something like this 'the Great Man theory of invention' -- which basically says that you can give ownership of an idea to one person, or one small group of people, and say that nothing like it existed before and nothing like it will be allowed to exist again for another 17 years, or longer in the case of copyrights. It's a terrible injustice to the innovation process.
The more we move into a digital world and the more easily our work becomes digitized and traceable, the more easily the origins on our influence become traceable. The Beatles borrowed from Elvis and everybody else. When they borrowed, it was OK because they were playing their music in small clubs and nobody could track their music. Now! when a hip-hop artist samples music off of CDs and puts together a song on his Apple (ipod), it becomes possible to say, "Wait a minute, you stole that melody from here and you stole this part from there." The creative process is the same, but now with technology we can tease out the influences and say, "This riff is owned by somebody else." All of a sudden, on an erroneous assumption, the law is meddling in the creative process. Guess its never been so tragic!
