> It's easy to forget how different the Middle East looked before the conquest of Islam starting in 600 AD.
It’s easy to forget because it’s a fabricated perspective. Islamic/Arabian conquest of MENA isn’t really that different from what Romans or Persians did. That region is literally the source of human civilization (in the Old World at least) and had seen empires come and go ever since the Bronze Age, and along with them all sorts of cultures and religions. What fundamentally changed the dynamics of the region is not the islamic conquest but the shift of the center of the global trade away from Middle East and the Mediterranean to the Western Europe.
It's YouTube that's the perpetrator of the tragedy of the commons here. There must be a mandatory expiration of any intellectual property into the public domain after a set amount of time and/or after the owner died and the state should first and foremost protect the intellectual property of the public domain, that is, prevent any party from claiming it exclusively and punish any offenders.
It’s easy to forget because it’s a fabricated perspective. Islamic/Arabian conquest of MENA isn’t really that different from what Romans or Persians did. That region is literally the source of human civilization (in the Old World at least) and had seen empires come and go ever since the Bronze Age, and along with them all sorts of cultures and religions. What fundamentally changed the dynamics of the region is not the islamic conquest but the shift of the center of the global trade away from Middle East and the Mediterranean to the Western Europe.