Nothing's New, Not Since We Created Fire

The Open Licensing unit in Wiley's Open Education Course is pretty challenging, in my view. I have  seen and even worked with some of the Creative Commons licenses in the past, but I really did need to take a closer look at them - not only because I did so poorly in the Game, but because I, like so many others, revel in context, and I do better with more of it.
After watching the video of Lessig at the start of the unit, I knew reading his article would be engaging, even if less so than watching him discuss these ideas. And I was right - his article "Against Perpetual Copyright" is a great argument for the Creative Commons, and a nod to the creative process as a whole.
What I like most about the article by Lessig is his ability to PLACE me in this conversation. I am not just a witness, not just a body in a chair, reading his words. His work is an appeal to creatives everywhere - even creatives like me, whose greatest creative achievement is usually something like finding a way to brew coffee without the filter, or making a picture frame hang straight with a piece of used gum on one of the corners. Needless to say, I never thought of myself as a creative person. But as it turns out, I am! And that's good news, not just to me, but to everyone out there who thought of themselves as "less-than" in the creativity category.
Lessig writes about large, intangible concepts like "culture" and "rights" and "public good." But he does so in a way that frames the virtue of  creation and the inherent power of the creatOR (that's us)  in an almost inspiring way.  Intellectual property is, as Lessig terms it, "non-rivalrous," meaning that  our understanding of/experience with that property or piece of work can not be given to us or taken away from us.  It is ours, inherently. It is our understanding, our experience. He uses the example of a poem - you can read it, and I can read it. You can hold it, touch it. It's real, it's there on the page in front of you. 20 more people can read it. The poem is tangible; our understanding of it, our reading and appreciation of the poem is not. No one can give us that experience; no one can take it away from us - except to take the actual poem out of our hands. And THAT is what perpetual copyright would - in part - seek to do. At least that's how I understand his point.
And if I understand it correctly, that's a powerful point - not only in the context of his argument against perpetual copyright, which he posits will place an undue burden on society if upheld as the standard - but in the context of just being human. I know, I know, it sounds grandiose and sort of lame, but really - think about it. Nothing - no one - can take away your experience of reading that poem, thinking what you think about it, feeling what you feel, knowing what you know after reading it. It's yours! That experience is yours, and outcome of that experience is yours. Anything you come away with after reading that poem is YOURS. And it wasn't given to you by the author. They lent you their poem, for sure, but they didn't author your experience with it. YOU DID.
But more to the point: Lessig concedes that while nothing, no THING, no piece of work, no creation is new - that is the greatest part of all.  Everything we do is built upon the work of someone else, someone who either came before us, or is contemporary with us:
"'Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before."" (from the 1993 White v. Samsung Electronics case, reprinted with permission by Lessig, http://wiki.lessig.org/index.php/Against_perpetual_copyright)
And so we are all unique in one way, through our own versions of creation and experience, and yet we are all connected in this other way, through history and culture and human existence.  Who knew that I would go in wondering about the "Share Alike" attribution license, and come away pondering existential issues?