The Invention of Ideas: How Copyright Transformed Human Knowledge—And How AI Might Free It

The year is 868 CE. In a cave near Dunhuang on the edge of the Silk Road, a man named Wang Jie prints a scroll and adds five words that would resonate across a millennium: "Reverently made for universal free distribution."
For most of human history, knowledge belonged to everyone. Then we invented copyright.
This episode traces the extraordinary journey from Wang Jie's gift to humanity through the birth of intellectual property—and asks whether AI will return us to universal distribution.
• The Diamond Sutra (868 CE): The world's oldest dated printed book, created for "universal free distribution"
• The House of Wisdom: How Baghdad's scholars preserved and advanced human knowledge without ownership
• Gutenberg's Revolution: The printing press that made copying effortless—and terrified the powerful
• The Stationers' Company (1557): How copyright began as censorship, not authors' rights
• Milton's Areopagitica: The first great argument for freedom of the press
• The Statute of Anne (1710): The world's first copyright law—and its forgotten 14-year limit
• Donaldson v. Beckett (1774): The House of Lords decision that copyright is statutory, not eternal
• The Berne Convention: How nations agreed on intellectual property—except America, the pirate republic
• The Mouse That Roared: Disney's lobbying triumph and the copyright term that only ever expands
• Sampling Wars: How hip-hop's golden age was legally destroyed—and creatively reborn
• The Permission Society: When creativity requires lawyers
Wang Jie didn't think he owned the Buddha's words. Medieval monks saw themselves as custodians, not owners. For centuries, the dominant assumption was that knowledge is common heritage—restricting it harms everyone.
Then came printing, then piracy panic, then the guilds who traded censorship for monopoly. Copyright was invented not to reward creators, but to control information. Only later was it reframed as "authors' rights."
Now AI can generate text, images, and code at near-zero cost. The scarcity that justified copyright is evaporating. What comes next may look less like the twentieth century—and more like Wang Jie's ninth.
This is the story of how we invented the idea that ideas can be owned—and why that invention may be reaching its end.