"... no one else could write my words or take my photographs"

Yes, and this makes a written work much more a total work than code. If someone takes a few (or a lot) lines of my code, and reuses those, I don't care (it might even make me happy). But when I write a well-crafted essay, and somebody takes a few paragraphs (not as quotes, but real re-use of prose), intersperses those with their own, and makes a new essay in this way, I'd feel troubled, even when I'm given proper attribution. Picking a few lines of code out of a program is fine. Picking a few lines of prose out of an essay is fine only when one is quoting: 'Marc says "...." and this is nonsense'.

To sum up the difference: you don't quote code, you reuse it but you may only quote my prose, not reuse it.

In a system that relies on eigen-value indexing, failing to cite is theft of force by coercion. It is both a crime of property and a crime against society because it denies the individual their right as the creator and it falsifies the societal memory. It warps the manifold in a way that decays the very means of sharing.

These are not metaphors. These are the way inbound linking systems work. Ultimately, they drive the participants away from open models into models that prevail by protecting the sources for resources through controls ever more Draconian.

Norm, your point seems somehow off the point. Under the existing CC-by-nc license, I can take your work, insert the word "not" randomly into your sentences, and republish it on my own web site, crediting you. As long as no one pays me for this (as if!), I'm gold. CC-by-nc doesn't even require that I specify that my version differs from yours! (This is why even rms prohibits derivative works of his opinion pieces.)

Consider what I did to one of ESR's rants. That was a fair-use parody, or at least I claim it was (ESR didn't think it was a bit funny). With CC-by-nc, I wouldn't have needed even that defense, and what becomes of that sense of ownership?

As I pointed out in my comment at http://norman.walsh.name/2005/08/25/rome, I can and did take your photographs, and your panoramic ones at that. Some of the details in your versions are different from mine, but so would the details of your atom2html.xsl when compared with my atom2html.xsl script if we both wrote one. As with the photographs, we'd both be separately using similar technology to achieve nearly identical goals. My Vatican panoramic picture has different people walking through it, bu my atom2html.xsl stylesheet would have different variable names as well, so I'm not sure of your distinction between no one else being able to write your words while someone else could use the same vocabulary and syntax to write keywords that the solve the same problem.

That is, if they had the same problem, just as you and I had the same problem of wanting to bring home a panoramic picture of the Vatican.