RogerEvansOnline.com

I used to spend lots of time contemplating the conditions under which texts and music were distributed and elaborated before the unexampled strictures of modern copyright law. In fact there was a time when I got paid to do so in academic dress. But I was perennially struggling to fit our current legal situation into the stream of cultural history. It can’t be done.

More and more people are realizing that new media can bring — and probably will make inevitable — a return to the earlier view of “intellectual property” that enabled the great flowerings of creativity in the past. The Wall Street Journal takes up the cause in an intelligent way here.