User Patronage : The Return of the Gift in the 'Crowd Society'

User Patronage : The Return of the Gift in the 'Crowd Society'

Journal article

64 pages

In this work, I discuss the tension between gift and market economy throughout the history of creativity. For millennia, the production of creative artifacts has lain at the intersection between gift and market economy. From the time of Pindar and Simonides—and until the Romanticism will commence a process leading to the complete commodification of creative artifacts—market exchange models run parallel to gift exchange. From Roman amicitia to the medieval and Renaissance belief that scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest, creativity has been repeatedly construed as a gift. Again, at the time of the British and French “battle of the booksellers,” the rhetoric of the gift still resounded powerfully from the nebula of the past to shape the constitutional moment of copyright law. The return of gift exchange models has a credible source in the history of creativity.

Published in : Michigan State Law Review 1983 (2015)

[East Lansing, Michigan] : Michigan State University College of Law, 2015.

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