Crying Woolf on copyright

John Naughton has a well-considered rant about “the copyright industry’s crazed drive towards the propertization of everything” (his words):

Every cultural artefact that our civilisation has valued is the result of an artist’s conscious and unconscious borrowing from the works of others. Lock down the borrowing and you lock down our culture.

And he quotes from Virginia Woolf in support of the idea:

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Call me cynical, but I’d be surprised if the average copyright industry executive has heard of Virginia Woolf, let alone read her…