Techdirt has posed the question of whether it’s possible to plagiarize a photograph (Jonathan Lethem’s article The Ecstasy of Influence is particularly interesting).

Ironically, the post immediately before that is about how the patent system is keeping Indonesia from sharing avian flu samples (for more about this, check out HealthySimplicity’s post on Indonesia’s avian flu samples).

Jonathan Lethem’s argument is that all art and writing is based on what could be considered the intellectual property of others.

Even Microsoft’s newest operating system is reputed to be based on many ideas that Apple came up with.

Copyright and intellectual property, as Techdirt correctly points out, are all about incentives. In the article above, Indonesia simply has no economic incentive to share their samples with the rest of the world.

Creating incentives to allow people (and on a larger scale, organizations and countries) to share knowledge is no small task. But in this case, incentives are in place that go against the very nature of human knowledge sharing (and in this case, the progress of medical science).

At least Captain Copyright won’t be visiting anyone any time soon.

And hopefully Steve Jobs’ call to abolish digital rights management will start to catch on.