http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/magazine/16hyde-t.html?partner=rss&emc =rss&pagewanted=all
"Thinker-politicians like Jefferson, Adams and Madison were just as familiar as we are with the metaphor that likens created work to physical property, especially to a landed estate. But they thought of that landed estate in a new way - as the basis of a republic. An American's land was his own - he owed allegiance to no sovereign - but his ownership imposed on him an almost sacred moral requirement to contribute to the public good. According to Hyde, this ethic of "civic republicanism" was the ideological engine that drove the founders' conception of intellectual property, and to his mind, it undercuts the ethic of "commercial republicanism" that dominates our current conception of it. Our right to property is not absolute; our possessions are held in trust, as it were. Seen through the prism of early civic Republicanism, Hyde asks, what might the creative self look like? Do we imagine that self as "solitary and self-made"? Or as "collective, common and interdependent"? "
