I grew up the son of a writer. He was a novelist, then a historian. And I remember at the bottom

of the manuscripts that he typed out and submitted on paper to publishers was always this

mysterious symbol, this little see you with a circle around. And I remember asking him,

what is that? And he told me that it was copyright. It signified this magical power that he had protecting him against

having his work stolen by other people. And I grew up sort of thinking about that a lot as

one of the sort of cool things about living in the United States. And I didn't really realize how cool until I went to lunch one day with a friend of mine

years ago when I was a magazine editor.

And he told me the story of having written a script and submitting it to a famous actor's

production company and then watching that actor go ahead and make the movie without

giving him any credit or involving him or certainly paying him in any way. And I was very cynical at the

time. I was sort of a, you know, I was kind of beaten down part of my career. And I remember thinking,

man, you must have gotten screwed, huh? And he laughed and he said, nope. He said he had registered it with the Writers Guild, which gave him

copyright. And then he sent, he had an attorney sent a demand letter to the company and he got a

big settlement. And he said, that's how I bought our apartment. I raised two kids there thanks to this.

Copyright in the United States is a big deal. It's constitutionally enshrined.

We, in our constitution, talk about the need to facilitate the progress of science and the

useful arts by basically giving exclusive ownership over a work to a creator, an author, a musician, a painter, whatever it is.

But at the same time, we don't give them the right to control the idea.

We give them the right to have ownership over the expression of the idea.

And that balance is a really important thing because it means you can't just say,

I own the idea for the internet or for flowers on a canvas. Instead, what you own is your

execution of that idea. And that is how we have in part been such an incredibly creative

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