© Zihan Chen | Notion

I'm not one for legalese. It's about as exciting as watching paint dry. Instead of boring you with a bunch of DOs and DONTs, let me tell you what I think about respecting the work of others.

When I was growing up, spending money on software was seen as downright ludicrous by many. While my buddies were busy downloading pirated versions of video games, I was one of those few who chose to pay. I remember having a fight with my mom about it once. She thought it was stupid to spend money on things that you could get easily for "free."

Well, to her defense, I used her credit card.

I thought respecting copyrights was just not stealing other people's work.

In my college days, I was introduced to the concept of recontextualization in contemporary art classes. It made me think about copyrights in a completely different way.

These people, Richard Prince, Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, and Marcel Duchamp. They didn't give a damn about the establishment's rules. They took what was already there, flipped it on its head, and called it art. Photos of other photos? Screenprinted soup cans? Dots on faces? A freakin' urinal?

But you know what? It worked, and it worked very well. They made people think - even more so than how the original worked did. They even made people question what art even is.

That's when it hit me. Copyrights don't just require conspicuous differences. They represent the innovative thoughts behind the work. And respecting other people's work doesn't hold us back, it moves us forward.

There have been so many game-changing ideas that seemed small or obvious in retrospect. But the amount of avant-garde thinking required to come up with those ideas was enormous, and sometimes unseen.

As a designer, inventor, and writer, I subsist on ideas. The more I stumble upon them, the more I realize how fortunate we are to be able to stand atop the shoulders of giants, to riff off the brilliance of others, and to accelerate progress in ways that would be impossible without the power of shared inspiration.

So we should not just view copyrights as something that means we gotta pay (but make sure you do ). We should appreciate them as a symbol of the ingenuity and brilliance of our most creative minds. And above all, we should respect copyrights as the legacy and promise that we leave for each other to build something better.

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