even for one such as me who could just placidly go along ignoring this whole fuss, I actually have a very powerful motive for throwing everything I have, rhetorically, passionately, emotionally onto the side of the copyleft, and the reason being that the other side tells a lie about what artists do and how they really think and feel and thrive. And also, there is a risk for every artist of damage being done not just to the ethos of how art is made, but to the actual traditions and behaviors. If more and more people really buy into this image of the Promethean isolated creator who’s only legitimate because he invents out of nothing — and it really informs the culture and the laws and the way art is taught and the way art is received — it’s propagating a dangerous befuddlement about how we really go about things. We’re in a really messy area. We pick stuff up and we fool around with it and it’s stuff. It’s stuff that’s around us. Some of it is owned, in some sense, by someone else and some of it isn’t, and sometimes we don’t even know, and sometimes we’re doing it half consciously. And we must. We must do all of these things. There’s no other possibility