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RE: Why You Should Care About Plagiarism and Fair Use

Here are some thoughts on this :

The purpose of copyright rules is to protect the interests of the creator. The creator should benefit personally from the creative work done. In a way Steemit is an innovative system which attempts to do this.

The problem is that copyright rules may actually stifle innovation. What I mean is that it can prevent people from collaboratively building on the best ideas of others. Instead of just running with the best ideas in the pool you begin to speculate about its origin. And worry about whether other people will "steal" it. If this mindset inhibits openness about sharing our best insights then we are missing out the best insights available. Thats a problem.

It can also be argued that copyright is fundamentally unnatural since it implies "ownership" of an idea. All great ideas are usually hybrids of other ideas. Often we pick things up along the way without thinking about it. Of course we could always try to give cred to our source of inspiration. But what if I just picked an idea up and dont remember where it came from?

There is also a unique kind of ideas which may be especially interesting to explore : Ideas which are for the benefit of EVERYBODY. If people create these kinds of ideas ( lets call them "ideas for sustainable win-win games" ) then we would WANT other people to copy it. Related to this is also the scenario where many people all over the world explore a subject at the same time. Then there is a very good chance that two or more people come upon almost the same idea at the same time. Should they have to worry about being the first one to get the official ownership? Would it not be better for everyone if they spent their energy on making the form of the idea as great as possible?

The main problem with copyright rules seems to be that the attitude of ownership to ideas does not inspire truly creative collaboration. It blocks the tendency to replicate and mutate structures. And the tendency to replicate and mutate structures is central to evolution in nature.

The ultimate potential of the internet may be as a system of exponential creativity leading to the evolution of human knowledge and intelligence. We can not afford to lose that. If the current forms of copyright rules prevent this there are powerful reasons to investigate alternatives.

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And the tendency to replicate and mutate structures is central to evolution in nature.

Well said! This is not something we should stifle.

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