Content creation

The first book of the Bible bears the late Greek name Genesis. God creates the earth, and man is involved in the creative process. In Hebrew (and also, for example, Greek), thinking, making, or creating something was a participation in the work of God. One can create something and imprint or project one's individuality and freedom into this work and so distinguish themselves from the rest of nature. 

According to Nietzsche, man is an animal that can promise. This means that although biologically rooted in nature, man has language and the ability to make and decide freely. Language is the essential means of every creation, this is probably most evident in programming - the programmer has an idea that he must translate into an algorithm, which is expressed by a specific programming language. It is then typically compiled, i.e. run and compiled, creating the program.  

The emergence of book printing at the end of the 15th century opened up space for significantly lower costs for creating publications, and thus began to emerge what can be described as a book market in the modern sense. Just as many works by various authors who would otherwise not have the opportunity to publish in handwritten book culture, and some even use self-publishing, the information revolution brings an even more profound and more meaningful process.  

Anyone can now write to the public in an instance. Folk creativity, which has long been a matter of writing in a drawer or had only a minimal reach, is entering the global environment of the Internet. It is available for critical discussion and consumption by anyone interested in it. Another technical, organizational, but also economic barrier is falling.

If we look at different competency frameworks for the 21st century, we will greatly emphasize creativity in almost all of them. Creativity is a requirement for every individual in the information society will be one of the most important impulses for changes in education, society, and culture in the coming years.    

It should also be noted that the publication or information explosion has never (since the 16th century) been received only positively. It has been criticized that anyone can write today that the quantity of publication output cannot imply quality, that information artifacts are formed too quickly, and that the world does not have its stable elements. The canon of what one should read or see to consider oneself an educator is missing.

It is also worth noting that digital technology is significantly changing the individual’s relationship with copyright. We are moving away from the traditional piracy associated with the 1990s and the 2000s into a completely different environment. If someone downloaded a film without the necessary copyright clearance, they could have deprived the authors (or distributor) of potential profit, but with several significant differences from ordinary theft. The principle of ordinary theft is that property is taken from another person – they had it and now they do not. Piracy, which is based on digital copies, does not have this effect. The work is reproduced, but it is not taken away from anyone. The argument regarding profitability is also problematic – would a person really buy a DVD or go to the cinema when they are downloading a film? Isn’t this a completely different kind of behaviour? After all, the growing popularity of services such as Netflix, Spotify and HBO Go shows that people do not always take great pleasure in piracy, but are, in a sense, forced into it. Indeed, one of the key drivers of piracy today is the attempt to circumvent local restrictions on who can watch what. The prevalence of ‘piracy’ today is often linked to the ability of major players to exploit data that nobody has provided to them for those specific purposes, for the sake of profit (typically the relationship between Wikipedia and OpenAI), or to their dominant market position, where creators have few other options available to them (typically Spotify).

These considerations naturally lead to demands for a specific redefinition or transformation of copyright, dating back to pre-digital times. In general, it is possible to perceive licenses as one of the essential topics, which is consciously or unconsciously, sooner or later, touched by everyone who creates some content.