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[DMCA-Activists] Re: [DMCA_Discuss] Zittrain: Call Off the Copyright War
From: |
William Abernathy |
Subject: |
[DMCA-Activists] Re: [DMCA_Discuss] Zittrain: Call Off the Copyright War |
Date: |
Wed, 27 Nov 2002 09:54:56 -0800 |
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Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529 |
Jean-Michel Smith wrote:
On Wednesday 27 November 2002 07:57 am, Seth Johnson wrote:
Nobody writes for free
The logic of providing incentives for creative work through
markets is intuitive and longstanding. As Samuel Johnson put
it: ''No [one] but a blockhead ever wrote, except for
money.''
Samuel Johnson is the blockhead. Reducing art to an economic commodity is a
disservice to artists, destructive to our cultural heritage, and should
frankly be insulting to anyone with a creative bone in their body.
Oh, balls. I write, both for money and for free. I like to write, but if it
weren't for a business model that provided for some payment for my work, I'd be
dragging phone wire for a living.
I write for free ( https://expressivefreedom.org/node.php?id=195 ), and a
brief perusal of USENET and the web will find countless examples of other
authors (some much more talented than myself) who also write for free.
Indeed, the most popular and widely read electronic books are Free (while
their commercial counterparts languish and go largely unused and unread).
>
> Why do people write for free? Because creativity is a pleasurable, enjoyable
> process, and sharing it with others (hearing their feedback, knowing that
> others enjoyed it) is a pleasurable process.
As a writer who is sympathetic to the cause of free software and fair use, the
simplicity of my allies' understanding of writing never ceases to amaze me.
There is a lot more to writing than late-night coding, Project Gutenberg, and
bad sci-fi. It's work. I used to write for newspapers. In order to get a
newspaper article onto the page, I needed to make long distance phone calls and
burn gasoline in order to interview witnesses and sources, and I had to be able
to head down to County Records during regular business hours, during which time
I could not hold down another day job. To do these things required that I got
paid, and no matter how much I loved my work, there was no way I could do it
without either being independently wealthy or receiving some consideration for
my services.
<snip>
Indeed, the logic of providing incentives for creative work through markets is
not intuitive, but a free market is not what a government entitlement
monopoly represents or creates. Creating "incentives" through government
entitlements such as copyrights (and patents, though that addresses a
different form of creativity) is both counterintuitive to economists, and
demonstrably problematic in numerous ways (as evidenced by the dramatic
decrease in published materials when copyrights were first created, as
evidenced by the plethora of derivative material...fan fiction and the
like... that is banned under the current system, as evidenced by the
ineffecient markets they have created in which talented artists are locked
out of markets by media cartels that enjoy powerful vertical monopolies over
their products, as evidenced perhaps most stunningly by the byzantine
copyright laws themselves, that bear a far greater resemblence to the planned
economies of the former eastern block than anything remotely resembling a
free market, and so on).
Look, I agree. Copyright and patent laws are sucky legal albatrosses. Do you
propose a better alternative? This is the problem. I interviewed record company
executives in 1994 who were way clueful about what was coming down the pike.
Many very smart people have thought long and hard about this problem, and none
of them has yet figured out how to make A) the legal fiction of intellectual
property function in a world of global, high-speed internetworking, and B)
creators work for free.
Elevating one incentive above all others (and very arguably one of the less
important and less potent incentives for creating art to boot), and defining
an entire regime of law that assumes that to be the only incentive, and
worse, favors publishers, middlemen, and IP lawyers over the artists
themselves, is only "intuitive" because it is the system we've had imposed
upon us from birth and been told by every media outlet there is, multiple
times every day, not to question.
>
There are other ways to provide artists with economic benefits for producing
art that do not require the granting of government enforced monopolies, and
while many such approaches may themselves be government entitlements of one
sort or another (tax breaks, etc.) at least, unlike entitlement monopolies,
they are neither antithetical to free markets, nor to the collaborative
creative process that lies at the foundation of virtually every project.
So your whole alternative to the legal edifice of copyright comes down to airily
waving your hands at "government entitlements of one sort or another (tax
breaks, etc.)?" Dude. You're punting. For starters, a tax break doesn't pay the
rent, and only helps if I have some other source of income. And can you imagine
the run on berets and striped shirts as hordes of bad artists descended on
government office buildings in search of entitlements? I'm certain there are
civil servants with a fine aesthetic eye and all, but I have a hunch that what
would evolve is a system of schlock for dollars with the Ministry of Art as
Patron in Chief. Putting this system to work in journalism would make for a
robust Fourth Estate, as well, starting with daring exposees of the government
journalist subsidy program and moving right on up to the senators and
congressmen who vote for its funding. The copyright system does have one
characteristic that no system of third-party patronage will ever have, which is
that it gives the people what they want, good, bad, or indifferent, and rewards
creators for the popularity or utility of their work. While it's easy to point
out the deficiencies and timidity of the corporate middlemen in the creative
industries, they ultimately play to the same master, the public. For all of
Hollywood's and New York's flaws (and they are legion), I trust the devils we
know far more than I am willing to entrust our aesthetic heritage to the Medicis
on the Potomac.
The Zittrain article tries to strike a balance between the two extremes of
having ASCAP barging into your shower for unlawfully humming a copyrighted tune
and having no copyright/compensation scheme whatsoever. I believe Lessig takes
this line as well. I agree with the sentiment, but am concerned that the
fundamental tension between instant, cheap, global telecommunication and the
restrictive monopoly publishing system may, ultimately, not be soluble. Until
that crisis point is reached, however (and, I'm convinced it's a lot farther
away than the RIAA/MPAA would have us believe), we must advocate, zealously, the
side of freedom. We should not buy the corporate line that dead people need
creative incentives, nor should we roll over and play dead when the copyright
industries try to overturn the Betamax case or work in any of their hundreds of
little ways to whittle away our freedoms in favor of their profits. But we
should be ever mindful that the other side does have a point, one that cannot be
easily dismissed by claiming that "true creativity is its own reward."
But enough of this. I have to go write for money.
--William Abernathy