The personality rights justifications of intellectual property are, as we have s
The personality rights justifications of intellectual property are, as we have seen in Chapter One, based on the main premise that the creator is the legitimate owner of the results of his creative work, because his personality is realised through his creative work. Supporters of the self-ownership thesis who believe that I might be right with my argument in Chapter Two, that the creative agent does not deserve the surplus from market transactions because of the labour he has put into his work, but that full self-ownership also implies that ideas are owned by the self-owner, would insist that ideas and expressions emerge from individual’s brains and therefore are owned by these individuals exclusively. But this individual creator concept includes two hidden premises. First, it requires that the creator is the sole source of this work in such a way that the result of his creative work can be attributed to him alone;[1] and second that in fact he himself as an active and responsible agent is the creator of the work. We will now examine these two hidden premises in more detail.
The creator as a meme copy machine
We usually think of every cultural expression as a result of one or more person’s labour. But it is more than just ‘labour’ that we attribute as the input factor for the result of a creative process. It is a kind of extraordinary creativity, which not every person is fortunate enough to have. For some it is even the divinity which talks to us, through the creator. Our perception of the artist is often that of a genius. But is the creator then really a creator in the sense of being a creative agent, or is he just a means to represent and reproduce what the ‘Zeitgeist’, God or his unconsciousness creates? Is the inventor really an inventor or is he just an explorer of what is already there? In other words, is creativity something where we act as active agents, or is it something which just happens unconsciously inside our neural system?
In the closing chapter of his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins introduces his postulate of the meme (Dawkins 2006).[2] In 1991 Daniel Dennett used this concept as an important building block for his account of how human consciousness can be understood from a materialist perspective (Dennett 1993). The term “meme” is an abbreviation of the ancient Greek word “mimeme” which stands for ‘imitator’. This happens through human imitation. Imitation is the building block of human culture and tradition. The brain is the copy machine for the memes. Cultural evolution occurs, like biological evolution, as soon as there is information which shows variation, selection and heredity. Memes get copied by imitation. During this copy process they are sometimes changed only slightly, and sometimes they are recombined with other memes, which leads to variation. Some memes are more successful in getting copied than others, which gives us selection. For example the idea of nations and states was more successful than the