Limitations to Creativity

written by Aizat.

According to John Locke, for something to be useful, you need to own it. Well, is that something refers to all creations and innovations produced by mankind or even beyond of what human limitations are. If that is the case, then I understand why copyright laws exist in the first place and how it relates to the intellectual property as in general. Intellectual property refers to the creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images and designs used in commerce. Under intellectual property law or copyright law, the creator of these abstract properties has certain exclusive rights for their own creation. This intellectual property rights provide the author or inventor a completely full control over their works preventing other people from making use or profit out of it without a necessary permission. Moreover, these rights are even considered by economists to be a form of temporary monopoly enforced by the state which what I can say equivalent to the capitalism trends we live under. The Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution authorized copyright legislation: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The debates that have been running through all this time before and until now on are about the explicit effectiveness of such legislation. This matter is what worrying Lessig when he questioning about how copyright laws can exactly promote people to produce something "beautiful". The term "beautiful" here refers to any kind of creative or artistic innovation created by human beings. For such brilliant people with high skills of creativity, it's not a big deal for them to create things that have a lot of goods inside it or to produce things that can come out with a big profit along side of it. So then, how about the average people who try to cope with this creativity innovation process when their sources of ideas or knowledge are constrained in tightly manner. If there are no certain boundaries being injected to intellectual property law, then there will be not much future innovations that we can visualize.