A Memetic Account of Creativity
Abstract
This Article argues that cultural creation, contrary to the creation narratives propagating in copyright law today, is a product of memes—replicating units of culture. The memetic account of cultural creation differs from that of the romantic or divinely-inspired author, both of which assume the author possesses intrinsic creativity that begets a cultural product belonging solely to her. Essentially, these creation narratives describe the author as the “driver” of culture, giving her the ability to steer the culture in any direction she wishes. Memetics offers a different perspective: although the creator may be able to veer culture in one direction more than another, she is more like a vehicle than a driver. The memetic creator is a brain with limited space, where memes compete for occupancy. Successful memes drive the creator to one place or another—with the direction chosen largely by the replicative potency of the memes occupying the creator’s mind.
A memetic account of creation has significant implications for copyright law. The idea that replicators—rather than indescribable creative processes ascribable to some unseen mythological force—play a (significant) role in cultural creation demonstrates, among other things, that moral rights are mistakenly author-centric; that derivate rights seriously misunderstand cultural creation and are cast too rigidly; and that various entitlements and rights contained in the Copyright Act need to be loosened, rather than tightened. Because people refuse to see themselves as driven by replicators and psychological processes rather than some intangible and indescribable urge to create, this account of creativity may be attacked (or feared) as deterministic or sterile. But those attacks should be set aside—if not permanently, then at least long enough for one to grasp what memetics can teach us about the current state of copyright law.