[ week 33 | 47 ]
Art, being a gift—
Monday, 23.47
So Heather had a contretemps with some chippie who stole her intellectual property.
Actually, let’s back up a minute and take a look at what, precisely, is going on.
A LiveJournaller (and there’s a term paper in the gap between the blogging world and the LiveJournal world and where they intersect and where they don’t and the mistaken perceptions each has of the other, but I digress) was apparently looking for a cool tattoo or maybe looking for something else and stumbled over (as in “I stumbled for Cambridge as an undergraduate”) a snap of Heather with a keen tattoo and gosh! Wow! That’s keen! Screen cap and command-c and command-v and you’ve got a copy of your very own that you can stick in your LiveJournal for friends and passersby to take a look at. Whaddaya think? Is it a neat tattoo? Should I put it on myself?
Now. What got stolen? And from whom? And how?
After all, keep in mind Heather makes her living in large part by selling photos of herself over the net, so—
Actually, she doesn’t sell photos. Not actual real-life 8x10 glossies. (She could. But she doesn’t.) The photos, such as they are, are made on the viewer’s own computer out of a stream of data. Heather sells access to a library of this datastuff that people who’ve paid for a key can then use to download and look at and enjoy. She still has the photo the LiveJournaller copied. She can still sell as many “copies” of it as she wants. —So no intellectual “property” has been stolen. Not in any meaningful sense. (Oh, one could point to the phantom income stream that would otherwise have come from the LiveJournaller or the LiveJournaller’s friends who are able to view this one lone image for free rather than ponying up, but really, how likely is that ever to have borne any fruit? The Law of Diminishing Returns has to kick in at some point.)
But!
Lemme put something else to you:
When you and your friends are playing with somebody’s art in the mud and you’re kicking it around and the artist walks up to you her own dam’ self and says, hey, you know, I did that, that’s mine, I’d really rather you didn’t, you know, kick it around in the mud like that, well, friends and neighbors, I don’t care if you found it lying on the street or paid $200 bucks a head on eBay for it, and I don’t care if you’re a soulless flack whose soul is in Hilary Rosen’s back pocket or the straightest of straightedge open source fedayin, basic manners and politesse demands that you stand up with a smile and stick out your hand for a shake and say, gosh, wow, you did this? It’s so cool! Thanks! I love it, really, I’m just, you know, kicking it around with my friends—guys! Look! This is the person who did this! Isn’t that too cool?
Not, and I want to make this perfectly clear: when the artist comes up and says, hey, you know, I did that, I’d really rather you didn’t, you know, stick it on your LiveJournals and talk about copying a tattoo I spent months devising, what you don’t do is ignore her, and what your friends don’t say is Jesus, you stuck-up bitch, it’s just a photo, what’s your fucking damage?
Because they aren’t doing anybody any favors.
Okay? We clear?
(Note that I’ve utterly ducked the Fair Use issues raised by the idea of basing a tattoo on someone else’s, directly or not. I did that on purpose. You’ve been in a tattoo shop before? Yes? No?)
Anyway. —Heather went this morning and wrote up a précis of copyright law which she mentioned to me would most likely be her response and cheeky me said, hey, read this if you want a Devil’s Advocate to play with, since understandably enough being far more of a working artist than yours truly she’s more prone to see copyright as a friend than as an enemy. (Praxis is just plain messier than theory. This is why enemy soldiers on the front lines always have more in common with each other than with their own brass, if they’d but stop and think a moment.) And she did read it and she says some stuff about it and she kicks it where it needs to get kicked. (Mawkish manifestoes just need to get kicked every now and again, you know?)
But!
I want to take a moment to stress something that usually seems to get lost in the welter of (usually violently negative) emotions that old manifesto of mine stirs up: Art is a gift, yes.
That doesn’t mean you have to give it away.
In fact, you can’t give it away. You can’t sell it. You can’t lose it. (You can maybe forget it, but it takes a while. Or not, if you didn’t fix it properly. Oops! Take notes, next time.)
But—assuming you’re the artist, mind—by virtue of the fact that you came up with it in the first place, you can control access to it. For a short time or a long time or even forever. And if your art is compelling enough and you’re lucky enough, you can sell that access—people will pay you money for a chance to have a look at your art. (Whether reading or listening or watching or downloading, mind.) In fact, the very success of that idea, that art, is contingent upon how quickly and readily and completely it spreads, from one person to the next, and the next, and the next... (It’s not a house. Art has never been a house. Not even in metaphor is art a fucking house.)
I mean, just because I’m an open source fan and an avowed supporter of collaging and clipping and copying and sampling and poaching even and all manner of Fair Use pushed to the utter edge and beyond doesn’t mean I don’t have a weather-eye out for the chance to make some cash along the way. By God.
So—all due respect to Heather, but I still think my basic outlook is eminently practical and even well-suited to making a buck. Certainly, I think it’s a much more sane and humane way to go about it in the internet day and age than legislating the shutdown of technological process and basic human communications in the name of eking out a few more megabucks from an outmoded income stream. And I will be cheeky me and note that her own basic business model—controlling access to her content which is infinitely perfectly duplicable; trading that access all over the world for cash; giving away generous portions to build buzz and interest and loyal artist-to-audience relationships—that all fits a lot more neatly into what I think I’m talking about when I talk about art being a gift than it does into traditional copyright as it’s been traditionally practiced for the 150 years or so that the arts-as-an-industry has been in place...
—That said, whatever we get: Big Content DRM nightmares, or open source public commons utopia for all, or some fucked-up drunkenly illogical and inconsistent in-between that’s always getting outrun by technology, whatever’s in store, we will always have assholes and freeloaders and cheapskates and downright rude motherfuckers without the manners God gave a flea.
Would that you could transfer dopeslaps through LimeWire as easily as mp3s. You know?
