Copyrights and copylefts : re-imagining intellectual property

Abstract

Copyright in its modern legal form has a brief history dating back to the early eighteenth century. While initial formulations betrayed some tension between natural rights and consequentialist views, jurisprudence would eventually settle on a form of compromise that attempted to balance the rights of authors with the overall benefit to society. Copyright protections largely mirrored the legal protections afforded to tangible property and the law principally treats intellectual objects as another form of ownership. I propose that this model is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative process and what occurs when an expression is created and disseminated to the public. The creative expression as property view fails to account for how the artist imbues an aspect of themselves into their expression and how the audience internalises those aspects. Instead, we ought to formulate a new legal paradigm that acknowledges creative expression as a manifestation of identity and affords the appropriate legal protections.