Confronting the Enclosure of the Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley via TechDirt (PDF). A snippet…

Real things are limited. If you don’t take care of the field, or if you overgraze it, then there’s not enough grass for the other sheep. With cultural works, it’s the exact opposite. The more they’re shared, the more valuable they become. People apply these ideas about scarcity to culture, and culture is not scarce. People are thinking of the “problem of abundance”: the idea that people don’t know what to do with abundance. But there is no tragedy of the cultural commons. I’ve read justifica- tions of copyright where people say that if culture is shared too much the value of the work is diluted. Who came up with that idea? The opposite is true: works do not become less valuable the more they’re shared; they become more valuable the more they’re shared. What on earth are they talking about when they say that sharing dilutes the value of the work?

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