Barbarian culture
I’m going to NYC today for a meeting sponsored by the World Economic Forum tomorrow, isolated and secure on Governor’s Island. (Jeez, have they no sense of: a) sybmolism; b) irony ?) I don’t actually understand what the meeting is about or for, but the attendees seem to be about 35 people from the entertainment industry and a few miscellaneous others. The title of the event is “Barbarians at the Gate.”
Here’s a draft of what I plan on saying during my 7 minute slot on the first panel of the morning. Your comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated because I’m feeling quite insecure about this:
I’m a capitalist of sorts and a writer of sorts, so I am sympathetic to the idea that creators should be paid for their work. But, I’m also a citizen and a member of cultural communities. So, for one moment, I’d like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they’re fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!
Now, I know it takes a Zen-like awareness to keep that one idea there purely, and to beat back the Buts that want to crowd in. And I by no means deny the validity of those Buts. “But if access were free, then artists couldn’t support themselves. ” I won’t want argue with that. “But it wouldn’t be fair.” I won’t argue that either, at least not here. All I want to do is put on the table a value that I think too often is left on the floor because, among commercial media companies, it has no champion: All things being equal, a world that shares art freely is a better world than one where access to art is stifled. And that’s at least as important as Sony making its quarterly numbers.
Let me stress that I am not arguing for free music, for no copyright, for not paying artists. I am only pointing to a value that should influence the discussion of how to pay for music, how long copyright should hold, and how artists should be supported.
Now, the right thing would be to explain my plan for how we can balance these interests. But I don’t have one. I’m drawn to the EFF’s plan for voluntary collective licensing, but I don’t understand the issues well enough to have an actual opinion. So, instead of offering a positive plan, I want to point to an assumption that I believe should not be made in the discussions of this issue: Pay-per-use looks seductively like the fairest solution, but it is not.
Pay-per-use is certainly fair for goods that are depleted with every use. But, of course, we don’t always insist on it. Not all highways have toll booths and even childless couples pay for public schools. That’s because we all benefit indirectly from having freedom of movement and an educated society. While art could be considered a public good of that sort, I think there’s an additional reason why we have to resist the temptation to move towards a pay-per-use model.
Compare a song or a book with a bicycle. A bike is an object that can move through the economy, being sold and resold at will without itself changing. Songs, books and movies have a bike-like side, but we do this weird thing to them that we don’t do with bikes: We publish them. And publishing is a unique and uniquely valuable process.
We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren’t passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist’s hands and enters our lives. And that’s not a betrayal of the work. That’s its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That’s artistic success, although it’s a branding failure.
Stifle that appropriation and you have literally killed culture. You stifle it by making every use of a creative work subject to legal and contractual guidelines. You stifle it by tracking every use of your bits.We need our appropriation of culture to be unimpeded by niggling concerns about nickels and galactic concerns about dimes. Culture grows in cracks in the sidewalk.
So, although I promised not to be practical, I think this suggests a guideline for a compromise that supports the highest value of enabling culture to thrive and the lesser and contributing value of enabling artists to make money from their works.
Distinguish works from effects. Artists should be compensated if we reproduce their bits outside our home. Not pay-per-view or even pay-per-bit. But tying compensation to the moving of bits like bikes makes sense. But loosen up the strictures on how we appropriate works of art. Ease up on the copyright insanity; you’ve really gone overboard with that one. End the war on your customers. That’s not just evil, it’s bad business. Let us do what we want with your bits in our own homes. In the US, don’t support the Broadcast Flag. Let us appropriate creative works because that’s what it means to be a creative work. Keep fair use as the norm and compensated use as the exception. Cut us some freaking slack, because that’s where and how culture grows.
One more thing. I’ve been arguing for using our new, remarkble global connectedness (unevenly distributed, to be sure) to foster the growth of cullture and civilization. That would make you the barbarians, I believe.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Thinking my thoughts
A bit from a draft speech by David Weinberger caught my eye:
We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to b…
Echoes of my “Giving World” idea a couple of years back David. But as you pointed out at the time, people still got to be paid somehow or how do they continue being creative? The only way this can happen is if people can have access to these items freely BUT they still need to give something back to the creator (i.e donating funds, etc) for them to continue creating. I think as you said at the time, most people probably wouldn’t do this so the idea wouldn’t fly. Nonetheless I still love thought of this type of world.
If we discovered some technology that allowed every person on this planet to have any object they wanted entirely free, would people stop making new things?
No.
People would still create. I’d even propose that people would create *better* works because they would be motivated by love instead of greed.
Weinberger: “free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world”
David Weinberger, author of the brilliant and seminal Small Pieces Loosely Joined, has posted a draft of a great speech on copyright that he’s giving at the World Economic Forum in NYC tomorrow: [F]or one moment, I’d like you to perform an exercise in …
“Free Access to Every Work of Creativity.. is a Better World”
David Weinberger:[F]or one moment, I’d like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they’re fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone …
Greetings!
It is now late Saturday and I don’t see a followup on how the speech went. Hope the frenzied mob didn’t linch Mr. Weinberger. As stated by several other responders, the argument that copyright protects the creators is a myth. In the late 80s & early 90s I authored a handful of trade books, a couple of which actually sold well enough to have been worth my time. The contract was always along these lines: the book would have a list price of $ 20.00 but the bookstores pay (at most) half that. Out of the remaining $ 10.00 must be paid transportation costs (books are heavy), printing costs, layout costs, artwork, etc. The author actually received somewhere between $ 1.00 and $ 0.50 per copy sold. This is why I no longer author books (but I’m still thinking about other distribution venues for my creativity).
In a practical sense the patent system and the copyright system are all skewed to favor huge, deep-pocketed, corporations which can afford to spend millions of dollars in litigation. Most of us wouldn’t stand a chance of winning against Engulf & Devour even if we could prove to anyone with an above room-temperature IQ that we had the documentation and patents granting us exclusivity for a given idea or creation.
What no-one seems to be pointing out is that all of the people most worked up about the copyright issues are the middle-men; the distribution channel monopolies that are rapidly becoming superfluous. What will happen when we no longer need record executives or movie studio moguls to decide which projects make it to market and which will go to the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones? The technology is rapidly approaching (it’s already here for audio and video shorts) to allow musicians and videographers to self-distribute to the fans. All that is missing is a credible and secure micropayment system.
Frankly, I regard most of the people who rush out and buy “exclusivity” devices such as ipods as what George Carlin describes as “hard of thinking.” By playing into the hands of the manipulative corporations, they continue to feed the monster. In the mean time, I’ll keep listening to my Emerson, Lake, & Palmer CDs and MP3s until my kids move me to the retirement home.
By the way, there was a news article over the last week where Sony was going to re-work it’s exclusivity audio device (which only played their proprietary format) so that it would also play MP3s. If my kids and their friends are any indication (they only purchase non-exclusive MP3 players), the marketplace will win in the long run.
Hello,
I have published poems in the internet but don’t even require tribute for them. Some of these poems are inspired by ideas of other people and all the poems have a non-commercial Creativ Commons lisence. That does not mean that i will stop writing new ones because I don’t get money for them.
The real source of creativity is only nature and this can not be paid for, because this source belongs to us all.
I even wonder who has the copyright of this writing. Sometimes the forumowner claims to have the copyright. But I think everybody should always have all the rights of her/his own creatings.
Charles F. Munat asserts “a bunch of middle men who never created anything of value in their lives.”
I never will say that! Who has the right to judge about the created values of other people?
Mr. Munat even wrote me for some time that the only person who is knowing her/his values, is the person itself. Has he perhaps changed his opion here too?
I never believe that a world in which patents, copyrights, competition etc. reign the market, will be a better world later.
I strongly believe that only cooperation can make the world to a much better place for everybody. And in this world the whole society has to support those who want to be creative, but can not require
from those people who are creative, more than a social conduct toward that society.
Greetings from the Netherlands
Ineke van der Maat
Just one moment
So, for one moment, I’d like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they’re fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has
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