Originality is one of those words that feels self-evident until you try to define it. Few concepts are invoked more confidently in art, and few collapse more quickly under closer inspection. Artists are expected to be original. Works are valued for their originality. Legal protection hinges on it. And yet, anyone who has seriously studied or practiced art knows how fragile this idea is.
Featured Image: The romantic ideal of originality — a solitary figure elevated above the world, yet standing on ground formed by what came before. (Caspar David Friedrich — Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818))
The romantic invention of originality
The idea that artworks emerge as radically new expressions from an individual creator feels deeply ingrained today. It is the dominant cultural image of artistic production: the solitary author, the inner voice, the unique gesture. But historically, this image is surprisingly young.
What crystallizes in European Romanticism is not creativity as such, but a specific moral framing of authorship. Artistic creation becomes tied to inner authenticity, personality, and genius. The artwork is no longer primarily a contribution to a shared tradition, but an emanation of an individual subject. Originality, in this sense, does not simply describe difference — it becomes a virtue (see Martha Woodmansee, The Genius and the Copyright).
This matters because it coincides with a period in which reproduction becomes economically and politically relevant at scale. Printing presses, publishers, music engravers, and later record industries require a way to assign exclusivity. The romantic author provides exactly that: a culturally compelling figure that makes private ownership of cultural expression appear natural, even necessary (see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners).
Originality, in other words, is not just an aesthetic category. It is a legitimizing narrative.
Copy, not creativity, was the original problem
Copyright did not emerge because society suddenly wanted to reward creativity. It emerged because copying became industrially feasible and economically disruptive.
Early copyright regimes are best understood as systems for regulating reproduction, distribution, and market order (see the Statute of Anne, 1710; historical commentary). The core concern was not whether something was metaphysically new, but who had the right to print, sell, and control copies. The language of “original works” enters later, as a way of stabilizing these regimes by tying rights to authors rather than printers.
This distinction is important, because it reveals a persistent confusion. We tend to read copyright as if it were about artistic value. It is not. It is about allocatable control in a system of reproduction (cf. Peter Jaszi, Toward a Theory of Copyright).
The romantic idea of originality helped fuse these domains. It allowed the law to lean on an intuitive moral claim: if a work is the authentic expression of an individual, then copying it without permission feels like a violation of something personal. The legal structure gains cultural plausibility.
But this plausibility comes at a cost.
What artists learn early — and law struggles to accept
In serious artistic training, one lesson arrives quickly: absolute originality does not exist. Art does not emerge ex nihilo. It is relational, referential, iterative. Styles are learned. Forms are inherited. Techniques circulate.
This understanding is not a postmodern provocation. It is basic professional literacy — articulated explicitly across movements such as collage, appropriation, Fluxus, and postmodernism (see e.g. writings around Fluxus).
In music, it becomes unavoidable. Techno, hip-hop, sampling, remix culture — these genres are not exceptions to an originality rule. They are demonstrations that the rule itself is fiction (see Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture).
And yet, copyright continues to operate as if works were cleanly attributable to singular acts of creation.
The resulting gap is what many artists intuitively feel as a kind of violence: the law seems to demand something that artistic practice knows to be false.
Music as a stress test for originality
Nowhere does this contradiction surface more clearly than in music.
Western music operates within a finite system: a limited number of pitches, scales, harmonic functions, rhythmic structures. Musical meaning emerges not from isolated elements, but from patterns, expectations, timbre, performance, production, and context. Groove, voice, sound, and aura matter at least as much as melody or harmony — often more.
Copyright, however, has historically anchored musical originality in what can be abstracted, fixed, and compared: notated melody, harmonic progression, formal structure. The “work” is treated as something that can be reduced to a lead sheet.
This reduction is not conceptually innocent. It systematically ignores precisely those dimensions of music that listeners often perceive as most distinctive: sound, texture, timing, articulation, performance.
The absurdity of recent plagiarism lawsuits follows directly from this mismatch. Claims are made on the basis of generic chord progressions, short ostinati, or stylistic resemblance — elements that function as shared musical vocabulary (e.g. Williams v. Gaye; Gray v. Hudson; Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin). Courts oscillate between rejecting such claims as too generic and inadvertently encouraging them by entertaining stylistic similarity as evidence.
The result is not protection of creativity, but strategic litigation. Copyright becomes a weapon, not a safeguard.
Richmond Law professor Jim Gibson, an expert in copyright law, shares the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Led Zeppelin copyright case involving “Stairway to Heaven”.
Free culture and the attempt to escape the trap
The free culture and copyleft movements of the early 2000s were, in part, a response to this deadlock. They did not deny authorship, but they rejected the assumption that exclusivity must be the default. Instead, they experimented with license systems that lower transaction costs, encourage reuse, and accept derivation as a cultural norm.
Creative Commons emerged from this context as a pragmatic compromise — not an abolition of copyright, but a way to reprogram it (see Lessig).
If this movement appears less visible today, that does not mean it failed. Its tools are widely embedded. What has changed is the battleground. Platform economies, streaming, and now machine learning have shifted the locus of extraction and control. The question is no longer only who may copy, but who may learn.
The future of music in machine learning systems will not be decided by whether outputs resemble inputs. It will be decided by how we organize participation, attribution, compensation, and access in a world where learning itself has become industrial.
A concept under pressure — and why that is useful
Originality is a story we keep telling because it has been useful. It justified ownership. It stabilized markets. It made legal abstractions feel human.
But as soon as we look closely — as artists, as listeners, as technologists — the story frays. Art is relational. Music is collective memory. (Human) learning is accumulation, not theft.
As machine learning enters cultural production, originality is increasingly used as a stand-in for unresolved questions of access, attribution, and value creation. The resulting pressure is useful precisely because it brings the concept of originality back onto the table — not as an ideal to be defended, but as a mechanism to be examined.
The task now is not to abolish originality, nor to retreat into romantic myths of genius. It is to reform how originality functions within legal and technical systems, so that authors’ rights remain meaningful without demanding an impossible standard of absolute novelty.
If originality is being renegotiated today, that is not a cultural loss. It is a necessary adjustment. The real risk lies not in reform, but in clinging to an unchanged concept while asking it to regulate a world it was never designed to govern.
