TED Talk on Creativity (and Patents&Copyright)

Kirby Ferguson's TED Talk: "Embrace the Remix" - a must-see - Boing Boing

creativity comes about as the result of creative re-use of others' work. It's not just explicit remixes and samples -- everything from the iPhone to Bob Dylan's music are made out of other peoples' inventions and creations.

It's possible that there is some domain in which creativity is often, or at least sometimes, a matter of someone who stays in an attic alone until the Great Work pops out, but this is certainly not the usual case, and the creativity which education (and "intellectual property" law) should encourage is certainly not of that sort. Creativity is, in common usage, a matter of adding something to the remix. Our current laws are actually anticonstitutional in that they actively discourage the creativity, the "progress", that the Constitution says they should promote. And yet we want to encourage creativity in that context. Hmm.
Or then again, maybe not.