@Qyriad indie art projects did try and have something like this in the 2000s; that’s the whole idea behind “Creative Commons”. reasons it hasn’t made as big of an impact include:

• “fair use” is a lot more weldefined for art than code. there is a level to which you can legally remix art without requiring any license at all.

• artists are not massive corporations and not as worried about big lawsuits. meanwhile people trying to reimplement code systems have to take careful precautions to not get sued by the original implementors.

• artists generally do not have high-paying jobs and cannot afford to give things away for free.

• most artists are very good at making art; “making art” is something they enjoy and they have no interest in taking shortcuts by copying someone else’s work. programmers, on the other hand, largely do not love programming. they hate reimplementing things someone else has implemented before.

• the size of artist teams is limited by both the need for cohesiveness of vision and economic reasons. nobody writes stories by committees. not many people want to volunteer to do gruntwork to manifest someone else’s vision.

areas where creative commons was or could be successful include:
• wikis
• netlabels
• blender open movie projects
• hip-hop
• roleplay servers
• wikis
• tabletop games
• zines
• wikis