Artists tend to follow unwritten rules about plagiarism. It is tacitly understood that stealing is the most dishonorable thing one can do to another—you don’t do it because you wouldn't want it done to you. We take inspiration from the dedication, skill and bravery of our peers, but their creative inventions are territory to respectfully avoid.

The notion of artistic territory—of ownership over ideas—is unpopular to acknowledge. It’s usually framed as a restrictive force holding artists back. Like copyright, only something that benefits corporations and lawyers. How can anyone own something like a style, aesthetic, point of view? Surely everything should be “up for grabs”.

Let’s set the question of ownership aside for a moment, and consider how the world of commercially driven creativity borrows heavily from the work of young, uncredited, uncompensated artists, yet the opposite is rarely true. In the interests of making money, artistic territory is not there to be honored, but plundered.

To artists, commerce presents both a danger and opportunity. There is a sense that once your ideas are exposed to the world they will lose some of their power, and because plagiarism is so rife, this can happen with or without you.

In recent years, a philosophy justifying creative theft has emerged in books and on the creative lecture circuit. It professes that there are no new ideas - everything’s already been thought of, therefore ideas cannot be stolen. This line of reasoning is popular among professional plagiarists and those working in commercial forms who feel guilty about it. They cling to Picasso's pithy line ‘great artists steal’ because it’s good for business.

The sense that everything has been thought of is familiar to everyone, because so often it appears to be true. We can spend months or even years searching for an idea that hasn’t yet found expression in the world, yet when we find one, it is unmistakable. Only a mind for which inspiration is foreign could believe there’s no such thing.

Of course, all ideas can be atomized to unoriginal elements, it is how these elements are arranged, combined and transformed where originality is realized, and where ideas and identity become entangled—a relationship which is necessary for bringing them into reality.

The ownership that forms over ideas may be temporary and illusory—yet the constraints produced by this illusion are vital for motivating and diversifying creative output. Without ownership there is no territory, and without territory there is nothing to explore, admire, build upon, defend or destroy.

We might imagine that an absence of this struggle would “set creativity free”, but it merely leads to repetition, regression and mediocrity. An abundance of imitation, like inbreeding, poisons the entire system. Our collective bias towards originality means we are forced to look deeper within and beyond to create surprise.

Honoring the association between creators and their contributions to the creative landscape keeps it alive, and encourages further contribution. Undermining attribution and consent—rationalizing artistic exploitation—does the opposite.