Knowledge Was Always Free
The Brief Era of Knowledge as Sacred Property
Somewhere around a fire, a long time ago, someone described a wheel.
Not patented it. Not filed it. Described it — with hands, with words, with a stick scratching circles in the dirt. And everyone sitting there learned it, and they told other people, and nobody could stop them, and nobody should have. That’s what knowledge is. One mind handing something to another. It’s been free for as long as humans have had language.
You know this intuitively. You retell stories — Aragorn’s love for Arwen, your grandmother’s recipe, the trick your coworker showed you for fixing a broken deploy. You hum songs you heard someone else sing. Knowledge moves because that’s what it does. Containing it is the unnatural act.
So when did we decide it was property?
The Temple’s View of Everything
The first enclosure didn’t look like censorship. It looked like literacy.
In ancient Sumer, only temple-trained scribes could write. Of the roughly 500,000 cuneiform tablets we’ve recovered, 85 percent are administrative — inventories, tax records, receipts. Only about 5 percent are literary. We have elaborate laments for the destruction of Ur, written around 2004 BCE. We have nothing from the perspective of the Elamites who destroyed it.
Nobody burned the Elamite perspective. It was never written down. If you couldn’t access a scribe, your knowledge didn’t persist.
The earliest named author in human history is Enheduanna — a high priestess installed by her father, King Sargon of Akkad. She’s remarkable, and she’s also the daughter of an emperor. The scribal curriculum was fixed and canonical. The temple decided what was worth recording. Diversity of perspective wasn’t the goal.
This is distribution capture at the point of creation. We don’t have the Sumerian street-level view of the world. We have the temple’s view of everything.
What the Monks Chose Not to Copy
A thousand years of European knowledge transmission ran through monasteries. Monks held the copying monopoly. If a text was going to survive, a monk had to decide it was worth the labor of hand-copying onto parchment.
They decided a lot of things weren’t worth it.
Livy wrote 142 books of Roman history. Thirty-five survive. Greek playwrights produced roughly a thousand tragedies. Thirty-three survive, across three authors. Epicurean philosophy — materialism, atomism, the idea that the universe operates through natural laws rather than divine will — was almost entirely lost. Not because time destroyed it. Because the institution controlling reproduction found it doctrinally dangerous.
Celsus wrote The True Word, the most comprehensive ancient pagan critique of Christianity. Every copy is gone. We can partially reconstruct it only because Origen quoted it while writing his rebuttal. The critique survived inside the refutation — nowhere else.
Constantine ordered all copies of Porphyry’s Against the Christians burned in 325 CE. He was thorough.
And then there’s the palimpsest. A thirteenth-century monk took a parchment containing Archimedes’ mathematical treatises — including The Method of Mechanical Theorems, a work that exists nowhere else — and scraped the text off to make a prayer book. We only recovered Archimedes’ proofs because modern imaging could read the ghost of the original ink beneath the prayers.
Distribution capture made physical. The institution didn’t just control which copies were made. It decided what deserved to exist.
But this wasn’t the whole story. While European monks were deciding what to scrape off parchment, Hunayn ibn Ishaq in ninth-century Baghdad was being paid the weight of his translations in gold. The Abbasid caliphs funded a systematic effort to translate every secular Greek text they could find — philosophy, medicine, mathematics, astronomy — into Arabic. Hunayn personally translated 129 works of Galen alone. No copyright. No enclosure. State-funded open knowledge production, while the same texts were being filtered and lost a few thousand miles west.
Apollonius’s Conics, Books V through VII — foundational mathematics — survive today only because of those Arabic translations. The Greek originals are gone. The monasteries didn’t keep them. Baghdad did.
Knowledge enclosure was never universal. It was a choice some institutions made and others didn’t.
What Happens When the Bottleneck Breaks
Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura — a first-century BCE poem laying out Epicurean atomic theory — survived the entire medieval period in exactly two manuscripts. Two copies, in a thousand years, of a work arguing that the universe is made of particles, not divine will.
It was first printed in 1473. Within decades, Epicurean atomism was circulating across Europe. A philosophy the monasteries had nearly lost flooded back the moment the reproduction bottleneck moved from monks to machines.
The Church understood immediately what had happened. In 1559, it published the Index of Prohibited Books — a direct attempt to re-enclose knowledge that the printing press had freed. It was unenforceable precisely because printing had decentralized reproduction. You can’t maintain a copying monopoly when anyone with capital can buy a press.
But here’s the thing: the printing press didn’t eliminate distribution capture. It moved it. Now you needed access to a press, to paper, to distribution networks. Publishers became the new gatekeepers. The content that spread was the content someone with capital chose to print.
Each liberation became the next enclosure.
The Re-Sacralization
Then, in 1710, the Statute of Anne.
The first copyright law. And with it, something new in the history of knowledge: the legal declaration that ideas, once expressed, are property.
Here’s what makes this strange. China had woodblock printing since the seventh century — six hundred years before Gutenberg. By the Song Dynasty, book prices had fallen to a tenth of what they’d been. Participation in the Imperial Examinations went from 30,000 to 400,000 as printed study materials spread. China never developed copyright. The Islamic world ran a massive, state-funded knowledge production system for centuries. No copyright. India’s first copyright law was imposed by the British in 1847. No pre-colonial non-Western civilization independently invented intellectual property law. Not one.
Copyright isn’t a natural response to printing. It’s a specifically Western European invention, later exported globally through colonialism. The Statute of Anne wasn’t humanity discovering a truth. It was one civilization making a choice.
Look at what that choice did. For millennia, knowledge was held sacred by religious institutions — temples, monasteries, the Church. The printing press broke that hold. Knowledge desacralized, went common, became accessible. And within two centuries, the legal system re-sacralized it. Different priesthood. Same structure.
The monks said: this knowledge belongs to God, and we are its stewards. Copyright said: this knowledge belongs to its creator, and the law is its steward. In both cases, the knowledge itself — the wheel, the song, the story, the atomic theory — is naturally free. The enclosure is imposed from outside, by institutions with the power to enforce it.
The phrase “intellectual property” does the work quietly. It sacramentalizes ideas as possessions. It makes the enclosure sound natural — of course you own your ideas, the way you own your house. But you don’t. Ideas aren’t land. They’re fire. Jefferson said it better than I can, in an 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” That’s not how property works. That’s how knowledge works.
The economic argument is simple: rent-seeking on things you didn’t create is parasitism. Nobody writes in a vacuum. Every novel draws on language shaped by millions of speakers. Every invention builds on centuries of prior knowledge. The value is collectively generated. Copyright doesn’t just sacralize knowledge — it makes it rentable. It gives individuals a toll booth on the commons. Life plus 70 years of extracting value from something the community built. Creators deserve to be paid for the labor of creation. That’s not what copyright protects. Copyright protects the rent — income from ownership, not production.
The enclosure period — from the Statute of Anne to now — is roughly 300 years. In the context of human knowledge transmission, that’s a blip. A brief experiment in making the naturally free artificially sacred.
The Experiment Is Ending
The internet made the enclosure implausible. Costless copying and distribution at distance did to copyright what the printing press did to the monastic copying monopoly — it moved the bottleneck somewhere the old institution couldn’t follow.
LLMs are making it absurd. Not just copying existing knowledge, but generating it — synthesizing, recombining, producing new text and code and analysis from pattern and specification. You can’t enclose what can be regenerated from description alone.
Knowledge is returning to its natural state. The campfire is back, and it’s global.
But every previous desacralization was met with re-enclosure. The printing press freed knowledge from monasteries and delivered it to publishers. The internet freed knowledge from publishers and delivered it to platforms. Each liberation became the setup for the next capture.
So the question isn’t whether the 300-year experiment in artificial sacredness is ending. It is. The question is what comes next — and whether the pattern holds.
A monk scraped Archimedes off the page to write prayers over him. Someone, right now, is trying to figure out the modern equivalent with LLMs.
This is part of a series exploring what happens when knowledge stops being property. Next: Copyright Is Dead. Copyleft Is Too.
James Henry is a senior engineer who started reading about Sumerian scribes to understand AI and hasn’t quite found his way back yet. He works with LLMs liberally — including in the writing of this post — because he believes the collaboration is the point, not the secret. More at jamesrahenry.substack.com.