Bill Thompson is a technology critic and blogs at andfinally.com

The Statute of Anne was ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’. What if, instead, it had been ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Sharing’. What if copyright, instead of being a state-granted monopoly on the right to make copies, was a state-imposed obligation to do just that?

After all, nothing is created in isolation, and nothing comes of nothing. The products of the creative imagination do not stand alone, unique products of one mind or one company. Perhaps the fact of creation should not, in itself, allow the effective expropriation of the intellectual common ground as a reward for adding something new to the rich and complex stew of culture.

If those advising Queen Anne had seen how copyright has stymied creative expression, placed barriers around so much modern culture and distorted our use of the Internet, the most powerful machine for sharing ever devised, then they might have thought differently.

So let us then recast copyright as a grant of stewardship over an element of our common inheritance, offered to a person or institution‚ for a limited period, but see it not as a privilege but a burden, one that charges its holders with an onerous responsibility which they can best discharge by ensuring the widest possible dissemination, full access by all means possible, and the maximum feasible use and reuse‚ of any copyright material they hold.

In this world anyone granted a ‘copyright’ is obliged to use it to fertilise the fields of creative endeavour, knowing that history – and not the market – will be their judge.