Intellectual property operates by preventing others from integrating knowledge into their lives. You cannot subject craft to this logic. It secures value not through legislation or regulation, but through the more direct means of its own physical difficulty. Skill cannot be owned as such, but neither is it for the taking. This frictional quality sets the handmade object apart from a world in which information and importance are too often conflated. Craft slows down the movement of knowledge and embeds it in a matrix of the mysterious.

Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft