Yet another important, counterintuitive finding…at least if you think that people respond only or mainly to economic incentives. Not to give the punchline away, but the success of open source software from a technical standpoint is one supporting datapoint. Can readers think of others?
By Dan Hunter, Dean, Swinburne Law School at Swinburne University of Technology. Originally published at The Conversation
Imagine you were asked to write a law that encouraged creativity. What would it look like? Whatever your answer, it’s pretty clear that it wouldn’t look like copyright.
Which is weird, right? Because copyright is supposed to be the law that spurs creativity. The problem, it turns out, is that the central features of copyright are directly opposed to the things that support creativity.
Creativity is a tricky thing to understand, and we have very little insight into what animates the creative spark and why some people are more creative than others.
But one thing we do know about creativity is that a really good way to make people less creative, is to pay them. A series of studies by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan Teresa Amabile, and others, have shown that primary school kids don’t learn to read if they’re paid to, artists produce their worst work when they’re commissioned to produce it, and people get worse at solving puzzles if you reward them for successful solutions.
The reason for this? Creativity is closely linked to motivation, and humans become creative when they’re internally motivated by curiosity or interest or desire. They get demotivated — and less creative – when you introduce money into the equation.
We always say that the copyright system supports creativity and artists. But copyright’s foundation is about the allocation of economic rights that are bought and sold. It’s a system that’s built on money, and copyright doesn’t even require that an artist or author be attributed as the creator of their work — which is strange since many artists accept that they won’t make much money, but every artist wants to be recognised as the creator of their own artwork.
So copyright is a legal system built on a premise that tends toreduce creative output, rather than increase it. And that’s even before we consider all of the problems that occur when commercial interests seek to extract the maximum value from their copyrights.
This isn’t to suggest that artists shouldn’t be able to eat. It’s just that if you were designing a system to maximise creativity then you wouldn’t tie creative output to cash like we do with copyrights.
So what would you do? Well, you might provide enough money for artists to live, but not tie it directly to the output, by providing grants or public subsidies or the like. Researchers at MIT showed a few years ago that a good way to encourage creativity is to provide long-term funding, rather than short term reward.
You would make sure that the best work of artists were supported, so you would expand the significance of prizes that award large amounts for very creative work. And you would almost certainly require some kind of requirement of attribution of a work, so that even if artists didn’t get paid, they would at least get their name in lights.
The other thing you would definitely do? Encourage a huge diversity of creativity, of all different sorts, without any expectation of commercial gain.
And of course that’s exactly what the internet does: from LOLcats, YouTubers, tweeting and fan fic, to whatever the new, new thing is going to be, the internet provides the medium of creation and distribution of a huge range of amateur material.
Not amateur in the sense that they don’t know what they’re doing — no, “amateur” in the sense that the people doing it are doing for the love of it, not for the creativity-depleting cash.
Maybe, just maybe, a few of these these amateurs will find a huge audience and be able to cash in. Like E.L. James, whose 50 Shades of Grey was originally a Twilight fanfic. Or the fabulously successful Silo novel series by Hugh Howey. Originally self-published, it’s since been printed in numerous countries, has been optioned by Hollywood, and is the basis of a writing stellar career. Howey has embraced the possibilities of the internet and has encouraged an entire community of authors to reuse his material in all manner of interesting ways.
But they didn’t start out this way, they started out doing it because they couldn’t help themselves: they were human and so they had to create.
We shouldn’t think that copyright is the only way, or even the best way, to encourage creativity in our society. Thanks to the internet, we are at the beginning of a brand new understanding of what other possibilities might work better.
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Now you wait just one minute, mister. Are you saying that people are motivated by something other than money??? {head explodes}
I KNEW that would break your brain!
well, i must disagree with the money squashes creativity idea. perhaps too much money makes people lazy and they’ll cut corners, but honestly money makes my brain juices flow because money can be turned in food and shelter.
i do agree, however, that long term funding is a great way to produce quality work. i had a gig in méxico where we were paid monthly by the state university to organize and play shows across the state and i must say it was both financial and artistically rewarding.
alas, that was the 20th century. now i suppose one has to prove the military usefulness of the art in order receive funding.
Frosty Zoom: Agree. Copyright was designed originally to protect writers, not Disney. Most arguments about copyright don’t deal with the main issue: Few people make more than a few dollars from their copyrights. So the arguments these days keep trumpeting Disney, as if Disney is the exception that somehow should destroy copyright law. The answer is to pay artitsts. Current American culture seems to believe that artists and writers get enough satisfaction just doing their work. Why pay them? Why let them have decent health insurance? Why let them have a pension? [They don’t seem to notice that Titian, say, had a long career subsidized mainly by the Church and the Serenissima.] Those rewards are for deans of law schools who attend creativity conferences.
that’s the ticket!
we need more kings!
i’m gonna post an ad on craig’s list looking for a king who will be my patron. who says artists aren’t good at business?!?
Actually, copyright originated to protect printers, not artists.
Yup. It also happened to serve well as a censorship tool, placing the power to decide publication in the hands of the monopoly. (Adult media operators who take credit cards get to deal with much the same thing now, just more obscured.)
My experience is that if you give your ideas away without a copyright, one has time to continue to have new ideas. Copyright issues take up too much time and energy and detract from the creative process. The worst part of writing a textbook is the effort required to obtain permission to use copyrighted photographs and graphics to illustrate the point one makes in the written material.
Perhaps this is why many books are directed primarily to the left brain of the reader.
If it’d be too much trouble to obtain permission for those copyrighted photographs and illustrations; it’s by far easier to add them to your collection of words which might contain a one-sided, and uncontested disgorgement of possible logical inconsistencies presented unchallenged, and pretend that the art was similarly sourced as one’s own.Textbooks are books of text that don’t last more than a couple of years, nor do they have need for copyright law that last longer than the next revision in two years; indeed they more like newpapers of passing thoughts than eternal photographs or illustrations.
It depends on what you consider “creativity” doesn’t it? In terms of capitalism copyright laws make a lot of sense–these laws allow a privileged few to accumulate capital which is the whole point of the system. We, as human cultures, have decided that to have a truly creative culture we need to use capital accumulation to fund social projects rather than using a collective community effort that tends towards conservativism. To put it another way capitalism was a liberal project.
At this time capitalism has reached its limits and we have been encountering the law of diminishing returns as creativity seems to be floundering as David Graeber pointed out in his essay “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” I believe capitalism is now regressive as it once was progressive and uses copyright to inhibit human development by radically expanding the laws to absurd degrees in order to enforce political control on the subject populations.
We are now in a historical moment that requires the breakdown of the obsolete order so that real development can occur this copyright should be undermined. Shakespeare did just fine without copyright and so can we.
what do you mean ‘we’, kimo sabe ? ? ?
no, ‘we’ didn’t decide the principles/laws on copyright, they were decided for us (or against us, might be a better term); while ORIGINALLY the deal was made which had benefits for society at large, the deal has been broken by korporate peoples who have arrogated all the benefits to themselves, and left us with -essentially- NOTHING…
THERE IS NO ‘tradeoff’ any longer with society granting a LIMITED monopoly to the rights holder (NOT necessarily the po’po artiste) in exchange for that information or creativity being eventually let loose for us all to use… but, it is so locked down and extended at this point, we effectively get NO BENEFIT, or it is so delayed as to be meaningless…
copyright is broken: ALL the benefits go to fictitious legal entities called korporate persons, who have SUPERIOR (and immortal) rights to mere flesh-and-blood human beans…
I agree copyright is broken and a feature of the ancien regime. By “we” I mean the human race–and particularly the dominant culture of the center of the Empire of Chaos–it is our culture that created and reflects the values that are enforced both through mind-control (PR, propaganda etc.) and violence/intimidation. Those of us who dissent are, even if we disagree with the mainstream, still responsible in a way because the very negative attitudes (selfishness/narcissism) that our culture radiates lives in each of us–we can’t avoid that.
As a starving musician, I support this announcement. But, let’s provide a Basic Income to all and watch the flowers bloom. And good luck, Madames CEO, enforcing copyrights and other quaint relics from the pre-digital age. IP is dead, but too stupid to know it.
Great comment! Musicians, actors, writers and all other creative people deserve to live a decent, comfortable life. Throughout much of human history creative people have either had to be in lucky circumstances, or able to find wealthy patrons, in order to survive. The anguish that Vincent Van Gogh experienced was at least partly due to his poverty. We need to start ensuring that all of our brothers and sisters are free to live lives of dignity and comfort. We shouldn’t do this to “reward” them for whatever they “produce,” but because all humans deserve a good life.
Fixed that for you.
The plumber gets paid for work performed. The doctor gets paid for work performed. The construction worker, engineer, car mechanic, geologist, secretary, researcher, all get paid for work performed.
But for some reason, artistic types just don’t seem to get why they should have to work to fill their stomachs. I wish no ill will towards them, but I have no interest in supporting their childish fantasies. Get a day job, like all the rest of us.
If we as a society developed an uncontrollable instinct to plant our fists in the faces of people who say “suck it up, buttercup”, the world WOULD be a better place.
Can’t you Americans just sadistically maim and torture yourselves instead of the whole rest of the world?
So your assertion is that if I don’t want to pay some ‘artiste’ to smear shit on a canvas, that I must be in favor of torture?
No, it just makes you arrogant and unable to conceive that things might be meant for people other than yourself.
You want prissy bourgeois European fine art to order? Go commission some and leave the rest of us alone. Those of us who can find something to appreciate in hard art would appreciate that.
True artists will create art regardless of whether they are paid or not.
I paint and make metal sculptures, but Ive never gotten paid for any of it AND I DONT CARE. I have my business for that.
You can always find a job AND do art on the side. It just means you have to get up in the morning with the other 90%. And you can make money through art if you try hard enough. Jesus, why do people want to turn to socialism so quickly? Basic income for all? Are you serious? Our government would have to be 1000x more efficient and greed would have to vanish for me to agree to that.
*ouch* that is going to set some hoop skirts to flouncing !
DO NOT disagree with what you say, EXCEPT i do agree with the principle espoused, as far as supporting artists appropriately…
now, there is the nub: what is “appropriate” ?
IF we are going to go down the guaranteed income route, then EVERYONE gets a slice of the pie, NOT just lazy SELF-PROCLAIMED artistic types… (i WILL NOT let a small percentage of the population self-anoint themselves as ‘artistic’, and everyone else is a simple-minded prole: EVERYONE is creative and artistic in some form or another, EVERYONE has an artist of one sort or another wanting to create, wanting to share, EVERYONE…)
and -yes- i THOROUGHLY recognize that *some* artists are extremely hardworking, blah blah blah; BUT as a creative person myself on my OWN time, my OWN dime, it is NOT like doing art is as hard as calculus, nor as grueling as digging ditches… it ain’t… AND, it is mostly fun and rewarding to DO, not to SELL…
i can turn wooden bowls like a pro (in fact, BETTER than a lot of ‘pro’ stuff i see at art fests, etc), but i could not care less about selling them… i would -and generally do- give it ALL away, JUST so people enjoy my works, NOT so i can hold up people for as much as i can squeeze out of them… maybe i could quit my day job and ‘make it’ as a pro; but -like most- i have too many obligations and bills such that a normal job is required to meet the budget… i simply can’t step out into thin air at this stage of my life on the chance i *MIGHT* be able to make a go of it…
but if i had a ‘grant’ or guaranteed income ? hell, yes, i’d quit tomorrow and be in my shop turning wood…
further, as with anything else, sturgeon tells us that 90% of anything is dreck; but you have to shuck a lot of empty oysters to get a pearl…
Yes everyone not just artists, even those who would like to spend much of their free time volunteering (what volunteer work is left is such a better world, that we can barely even conceive of now) rather than on art, even bloggers who fancy themselves creative, a few of them actually are.
Although I think well paid part-time (20 hours a week maybe) work would accomplish much the same thing. It would leave most people enough TIME to also create besides working, so it might be the best compromise between a BIG and a JG. A full time job guarantee would not leave people the time they need to create.
The most “creative” person I know is a single mother who works three jobs. She has very little time or energy left to devote to artistic pursuits. Are we as a society better off because she has to work 70+ hours a week to stay out of the poorhouse?
There is dignity and value in all sorts of human activity. The “market value” of throwing a 97 mph fastball consistently into the strike zone is absurdly high, while that of waiting tables is far too low. This Calvinist notion that being showered with a lot of resources is a sure sign of divine favor is pernicious in the extreme.
The “market” values designing bunker-busting bombs– that kill children– a lot more than teaching children to make art. It is not a childish fantasy to hope that this might change!
Wow what a backwards way of thinking. So because some single mother of three wants to do art, we have to apparently turn to socialism? Let me let you in on something: socialism has been tested through and through, and it only works in relatively small countries that can be easily managed due to size, homogeny of the population, etc. Your government has to be EFFICIENT. Do you have any idea what would happen if we tried socialism in America? Think massive corruption, shittier healthcare, and virtually no class mobility.
And last time I checked, the world’s greatest artists created amazing works of art starving, depressed, poor, etc. There is something in boredom and struggle that makes man strive their hardest. A single mother of three…well if she truly wanted to pursue art, she wouldnt have had three kids. I dont know many artists that have kids, let alone three. Sometimes, you can;t have it all.
Hear hear! Everyone should have a guaranteed income, and many, many wonderful things will happen. I believe that chopping off a few areas human endeavours and calling only them ‘art’ misunderstands what it is to be creative. Art encompasses every area of human endeavour. People who build houses, make gardens, teach children, weave baskets and prepare food can all bring beauty to their work. Back in the day, everyone was an artist and household objects from olden times are now museum pieces and collectors items. Beauty, elegance and fitness of purpose is important in useful and everyday things, not just for objets d’art.
Frosty, I agree about money, but I have to say that while *worrying* about money stops my creativity, more money doesn’t necessarily make me more creative. There is that old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention”, but I have never found that to be true. Necessity is only the father, it is leisure that is the mother.
Yes, free income for all. I too am a musician – i have not only seen a guitar but have sat at a piano! Only those who don’t understand my art say that my skills are lacking. We should take the money from those who work the ‘other’ jobs – the neanderthals (tradesmen), aristocrats (lawyers, doctors), and freeloaders (public servants) – so that i can develop my art without the petty inconvenience of having to be up before noon. Why should my (admittedly minuscule) following suffer from the lack of my unique musical perspective while I must toil away like some unskilled common man? Why must I risk my art, my style, my soul so that I might eat? Plenty of others can work, let me play.
To all those people who think the meaning of life is to work yourself to death — I invite you to do so, preferably out of sight and earshot of the rest of the world, sparing them your whines of entitlement to watch others suffer. That’s really what it is, isn’t it? People who believe in wage labor either get off on watching other people suffer, or are so propagandized and/or dull-minded they can’t even imagine any other system of allocation working.
Dmitry Orlov’s recent post is right — the American disease can’t be cured, only contained.
I work to live, I don’t live to work. I have no problem supporting my hobbies with the money I earn. I don’t need to beg or demand others to support my hobbies.
I don’t see what the issue is here, except for a bunch of freeloaders demanding payment for art that the people already aren’t interested in paying for.
Fair enough, the MPAA and its members are one step above exactly that (except that they loan-shark too).
Of course, you seem to be very strongly attached to the belief that the only proper principle of distribution is exchange, and if you don’t think that the world having been shaped over the past 300 years or so to tilt the playing field in exchange’s favor to supplant any other is a *problem*, maybe we won’t see eye to eye.
Hmm. How is funding consumption not an exchange?
Ummm….yeah the meaning of life is to WORK. Sorry to burst your 21st century bubble but almost 2/3 of the population of the world works in agriculture, day in day out. They work, so that Americans in their fantasy worlds dont have to even THINK about growing food for themselves, and some, apparently you, go the step further into thinking that somehow, people should be entitled to…not work? Your mixing up your facts. Just because the elite dont have to work, doesnt mean now everybody doesnt have to work. There will ALWAYS be someone taking advantage of others. Grow up. You cant change the world. But you can, at least, sympathize with those that HAVE to work. Yes to DEATH. If you took away those people, you wouldnt be able to EAT, DRIVE, SHOWER, etc. Where do you think the petrochemicals to do all of the above come from? Fertilizers? Wood? 3rd world countries, that’s where.
80% of the worlds resources goes to the top 20%. How is thinking that the meaning to life is to work and give back society entitlement? Absurd. You live in delusion, hunkerdown.
Assuming that the powers that be have any capacity for self-preservation, they’ll adopt a BIG. After all, bread and circuses had quite a good run in the Roman Empire.
Very well said!!
Virginia Woolf once argued that five hundred pounds a year, and a room with a lock on the door, should be sufficient for a good creative artist to realize her full potential. Creativity, however, is not like a house plant that needs just the right kind of pot, soil, light, and water to thrive. A creative soul is more like a dandelion, thriving where more favored plants often falter.
I have a friend who was honored with a MacArthur fellowship. He freely confesses that he enjoyed the honor, and the easy circumstances that the grant allowed him for a time. Yet he also admits that he would have found ways to hustle space and time– to create– in his difficult life even if nobody ever gave him a dime, or any public recognition. Indeed, he first saw his creative pursuits as nothing more than a private activity– that helped him stay sane, in a harsh world that demanded much of his time be spent in soul-crushing drudgery.
Five hundred pounds in 1929, when she made that statement, by the BLS is equivalent to $ 34,500 today, a bit more than the current per capita mean personal income of $ 28,829.
I hate to think how much higher than the poverty level for a small family that is. Some people may be islands, able to live solitary lives…but most aren’t that anti-social. They marry, they have children, they gather dependents…and the system punishes them for it. It especially punishes women. Fix that problem, and I think most social and economic problems will be solved.
Another supporting datapoint would be the support given in the New Deal era to artists by FDR – I have a friend whose father was one of those who painted murals for government buildings, and we all remember Diego Rivera. There would be many others from that era whose work speaks for itself.
I would, though, take exception to the point emphasized in the article that every artist wants to be known for her/his work – there’s creative input from many who prefer to remain anonymous online and don’t require payment, which hearkens back to religious artists who left their works unsigned, so there is that. I also think those who anonymously created our wonderful national parks in that same New Deal era were artists. Plus of course the cave painters, ancient archeological artifacts . . . maybe those persons unknown were paid for their works at the time they created them, but there’s a wonder in not knowing who they were, or are.
It isn’t only ‘to make a name’ that creativity happens – sometimes it just happens because somebody wants to make the world more beautiful.
FDR’s support for artistic work is a Jobs Guarantee equivalent, not a Basic Income equivalent.
“So what would you do? Well, you might provide enough money for artists to live, but not tie it directly to the output, by providing grants or public subsidies or the like. Researchers at MIT showed a few years ago that a good way to encourage creativity is to provide long-term funding, rather than short term reward.”
Creativity in what? If one is talking works of art, written or recorded, I think the world is going a certain way – free or at least not paid for the way it has in the past. There are way too many people who can write, sing, make music, and draw – and the bottleneck that made all this material unavailable has been broken. It will take a long time for the way we do things to unravel – mostly like to old fogeys like me who still watch movies made by big capitalistic companies, big Tee Vee, and old records, but I am watching more and more small independent movies posted on Youtube and sites like:
https://indieflix.com/
as well as music. Its cheaper, and often better and more interesting…
On things like scientific creativity, this is so true: “Researchers at MIT showed a few years ago that a good way to encourage creativity is to provide long-term funding, rather than short term reward”
There is a lot of evidence that pharmaceutical research hinders drug discovery because of the need for secrecy, as well as the time limits on a project, and the tunnel vision to try and address one aspect of one disease. So much of profound medical discovery is serendipity – a person with great intelligence, great dedication, motivated by love of discovery and FREE to follow the path that the evidence, his only interest and knowledge takes him/her, and the esteem of colleagues. Money is a necessity to be able to live, but it doesn’t motivate most of these individuals.
It will take a while, but with more and more genomes discovered and published, great discovers may soon be coming from “amateur” biologists and physician wannbes…
Science example – amateurs and astronomy
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Space/story?id=8221167
God is on the ropes: The brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified Salon (margarita)
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/03/god_is_on_the_ropes_the_brilliant_new_science_that_has_creationists_and_the_christian_right_terrified/
~~~~~~~~~~from yesterday’s links. Life begins by cells replicating themselves in a bath, or soup. Imagine if nature had copyright laws, life could not exist.
Interesting way to look at it. Consider that forcing every new idea or urge to be slightly too different to survive (in the natural world) and creativity would die, and so would ecosystems. It’s analogous to the apple not falling far from the tree. But in the human imaginary world of money, slightly too different is great – it’s the next hot thing that we proliferate like cancer, and end up buried under a mountain of trash. Allowing copyright to end would not change the world too drastically, but it would create less demand for the next great exploitable idea whether good or bad. Most of them bad, as we know.
Every creative person I know understands that creativity thrives most in an environment of sharing, borrowing, “stealing”, and generally of people playing off one another. This is why you see so often the most creative outputs coming from folks who were all friends (Paris in the 20s, the Algonquin Round Table, the Beats in the 50s/60s, etc.). Think of how many pieces of classical music are variations on a theme from some other composer.
Creative people want, of course, to be compensated for our work – we don’t actually want to be “starving” artists. But, I know very few who think rigidly enforcing copyright is helping us, the creatives – it is there to make more profits for the big media companies.
At this time I see no benefit to anyone to copyright other than well-established artists and large corporations. The whole business of having a “name” in art is much more important than the actual art in the art world that is now driven exclusively on market principles. This whole superstar trip is sickening–we need to appreciate the edges of art and music a little more.
One of the things that really bothered me is that people in the art world demand a resume, connections, and working in one recognizable style–experimentation is frowned upon.
In my experience, big money ruins everything
The case of open source software can be complicated. The open source software license GPL depends crucially on copyright for its enforcement. No copyright, no license. An example of software using this license is WordPress. While the software distributed under this license is usually without a fee, this is not essential. As founder Richard Stallman explains, the ‘free’ in Free Software is like the ‘free’ in ‘free speech’, not the ‘free’ in ‘free beer’. Richard Stallman at one time and may still believe that programmers should be publicly funded.
The X Window System used by Linux and Mac user interfaces is a product originally of MIT and was released under a license much like the author proposes in that it guarantees that contributors will be acknowledged but otherwise imposes no restrictions. There are other open source software licenses, for example the Apache license which almost surely applies to your web server software.
The motivations of open source contributors, of which I am one, can be non economic, just a desire to give back but this need not be true for all. For example, MySQL was developed by a for profit company. Open source software can make money by having different versions, providing customization, support, etc. In those cases the decision to go open source is essentially just a choice about distribution. For developers open source contributions can also be a form of promotion, of advertising. It shows potential clients a sample of your work.
By the way, you don’t have to be a techie to contribute to open source software. There are things ordinary end users can create, for example documentation and tutorials.
There is hope: the Pirate Party’s lone MEP is engaged in revising the EC’s Copyright Directive. “The EU copyright framework makes the protection of rights-holders mandatory, but the rights of the public only optional” says the rapporteur. Weak sauce, like Elizabeth Warren as the token moderate on the banking committee? Or does the EU still kinda sorta wanna deliver to the little people?
(^comment was meant to be a response to the post, not the comment above it)
The copyright in “free software” is just like the Constitutional backing of Free Speech: to keep others from usurp the rights to the same.
I guess my explanation of the different types of open source soft licenses just went right by.
A psychology experiment reported just a while ago (the matches/candle/box-of-thumbtacks experiment) indicated people posed with a little problem took longer on the whole to solve it when a monetary reward was at stake. Interpretation was that people faced with losing money were reluctant to take their noses off the grindstone and step back and recontextualize the problem. The write-up may be available under the Deci/Ryan/Amabile link, but I couldn’t find it. There is a fun one in there saying money can aid memory consolidation, but “only for boring material.”
_Freakonomics_ might be an example of what’s meant. The original book was quite nifty, but once, IMHO, the authors had a brand to maintain, and they became, IMHO, worth plying by Nathan Myhrvold, the sequel _Superfreakonomics_ became, IMHO, quite dismal.
it’s easy to see…just look at the pablum that has been produced by the revolutionary writers and artists of the 60s after they were co-opted by government money for the arts…meanwhile, those who refused the grants as a matter of principle are still producing cutting edge stuff..
I could suggest a simple reform: copyrights to be owned only by individuals, the original creators or their immediate heirs, never by corporations. Corps would have only licenses, awarded at the pleasure of the individuals (or small groups, when appropriate). Requiring ascription to the original creator would fit well with this reform.
The premise of the article is slightly askew: copyright serves primarily to support creators by creating a revenue stream after the fact. It isn’t primarily a reward system. The problem is that it’s been captured by large businesses – the story of our lives, these days.
The existence of retroactive extensions of patent protection offers clear refutation of the rationales usually put forth for copyrights in the first place.
Giving Walt Disney another fifty years to make money off of Mickey Mouse is not going to incent anyone to jump into a time machine and do anything creative now.
Like marriage, copyright is an institution that has been revised many times over history, and the rationales offered before don’t really apply to the institution now (or vice versa). That’s the wonderful thing about institutions: their benefits and costs to society are rooted in the delusion that time doesn’t pass.
If Disney’s so-called creative output weren’t nauseating I’d pirate more of it. But American anime has no soul that’s not injection-molded and bulk packed.
Bell Labs.
They didn’t get stock grants, massive bonuses or made gobs of money off patents and copyright. Sure, they got paid decently, but most of those like Dennis Ritchie, Claude Shannon, etc. never got very wealthy.
I assure you that AT&T made “gobs of money” however. Capital wins, labor loses. Those are the rules of the game.
It seems like assuming that ‘copyright’ and ‘compensation’ are interchangeable is a pretty big leap. Copyrights are an old method to preserve ownership, I would say, not guarantee payment. Value, after all, is relative. No artist is or should be guaranteed compensation for creativity–the rights to the product of creativity simply serves to show ownership. It is a broken system that seeks to equate tangible property (House) with creative property (Idea for a better Mousetrap).
The difference between creating on demand, i.e. commissioned creativity , and creating independently with the hope of retaining ownership and capitalizing on the result of said creativity (with no guarantee or advance on payment) is a pretty big one.
Not all exclusive rights are property rights. It is an error to project the Ferengi present into the past.
That’s hilarious. There is no difference in quality between Hollywood horse dung written on spec and written on contract.
Have you never heard of “love”?
DJs have been showing us this for decades now. Patents aren’t really any better, but that is a different discussion I suppose.
“Yet another important, counterintuitive finding…at least if you think that people respond only or mainly to economic incentives. … Can readers think of others?”
“The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves” by Dan Ariely begins with an experiment establishing the invalidity of several intuitions re “SMORC” — the simple model of rational crime. For example, rates of cheating generally bear no relation to the size of potential rewards, and the relationship between rates of cheating and likelihood of discovery is very far from linear. More intuitively, subjects cheated twice as much when the immediate gains were not hard cash, but tokens that would be cashed at the end of experiment. Small wonder the degree of immorality re derivatives…
I do not believe that anyone commenting on this post, or the original post, has had anything to do with actual copyright issues on a real, practical basis, or understands U.S. copyright law in even a fundamental, elementary form. Sorry, but without anything resembling some understanding of basic copyright law, this is a lot of bullshit.
Help us out, please. Point out some specific errors.
Thanks in advance.
I take strong exception to this posting and so I undertook a paragraph by paragraph break down of the author’s argument. Beware, rant material follows!
Setting up the argument, but really limiting the argument to a easy to handle one
No, copyright is not “supposed to be” any such thing, the author is creating a false trail. Copyright is a political solution to a business problem, not a creativity problem. So the author is already over simplifying the issue.
Not saying clearly what is the issue of creativity and how copyright affects the issue
Academic BS. There is plenty of documentation on what is and how is creativity – try “Organizing Creativity” by Daniel Wessel, a book on just that – what is and how is creativity, which is really what copyright, patents, and other IP law is really about.
Give a counter intuitive example, especially one that supports an elitist argument
Hum, seriously sounds like union busting. I suspect the studies were wrongly focused – the “creativity” desired was the money, not the supposed thing that was created – did the authors asked the creators why they created? But hats off for the academic dodge of citing studies and then offering a conclusion. Just wondering whose? You or the authors, you didn’t say.
Major give-away of a not in-depth argument
Too easy! Who is this “We always”? Using absolute terms in arguing is a no-no, nothing is 100 %, tsk-tsk.
Ah, now for the real heart of the issue
Yes, real thought, real insight. But…the author glosses over it. Is “creativity” (which is the entire activity of having an idea, linking this idea to other ideas, converting these ideas to a thing or gadget or whatever to getting someone else to use the thing, gadget, whatever – that is creativity, not just having an idea or two) a thing that can be bought and sold? Can it be bought and sold independent of the creator? Is there a time limit for this “right” that is bought and sold? Are there any limits on this “right”? (The old answers were yes, yes, yes; today I think it is yes, no, no)
More real thought, but to what use?
Why is that? He doesn’t say. He uses this factoid to set up the following joke.
Now state an extreme position, too extreme to be considered, and yet…
Ha, ha. Funny. Lets joke around with the artists here, lets pretend that they are different from us “regular” folk.
Without defining the central idea, you can do what you want
Now he talks of an output, hence there must be a process somewhere. But he never mentioned a process and so he can keep it vague. To be fussy, what system is the author talking about? Today’s copyright system? Yesterday’s system? The commercial music system, the software system, the movie and film system?
And now for the author’s solution to his vaguely defined issue
Oh no, here we go, getting roped in as a member of the “you” group, which seems to curiously not include artists…
Dead give away of an elitist at work. Who decides what is “best”, what is “work”, who is an “artist”?
Huh? He hasn’t defined creativity, yet here he is saying for us to increase our output. How? And I love that dig about working for free!
Now for the solution
That’s an interesting leap there. First, the internet is getting more focused on social information extraction, not on increasing information in general. And the internet is concerned only with digital information. If it ain’t in bits and bites, it is lost, destroyed, or ignored by the internet. Creativity is about making something tangible, the internet is mostly about non-tangible information forms.
In the solution is the elitist argument out in the open
Another give-away of an elitist – amateur is good, cash is bad.
Now for the example of “true” artists – the ones who did it for free… but seem to make the money anyway.
Vulgar, as my mother would have said. Not that I’m above vulgar, but again, elitist love to tout porn as “art”. The hypocrisy is what curls my toes.
Further stating the elitist position…
Just so long as they are married, to each other, and are the proper race… oh, he meant to create things…
His take on the future
He hasn’t defined what copyright is, nor creativity, nor what is the relationship between the two is. He just says they are related and that is that.
My take on the posting? Obviously not much. Seems to be a ringing endorsement of the status quo and letting technology (aka the internet) solve our problems. Its just that my view of the issues of copyright, creativity, and how society and the creator can support each other seem to lie outside of the author’s world.
I pretty much ignored his discussion of copyright. I thought the interesting part was the finding that paying people to be creative often had the reverse effect.
Well history would say otherwise, but what do we know. “Intellectual Property” (a terrible phrase) is rent extraction, bottom line. Compensation, and all its peculiarities, is a different concept that no longer has a place with our understanding of copyright, trademark, and patent, they are far too corrupted academically, economically, and socially. People who defend them ardently tend to have a vested interest in them, go figure.