Copyrighting creativity and just … copying

Interesting bout last night at the Cleveland Institute of Art. The final score?

Cheaters – 2, poor creative people – zip

I shouldn’t be surprised, and yet I find myself dumbstruck all over again that those humans who invent and express are essentially helpless to prevent all the others from making off with the fruit of that creative work and draining the profitability from it . .. unless the inventive, expressive people are already rich. And how many of you are? Uh huh. That’s what I thought.  

The occasion was a forum on intellectual property and the arts presented by the COSE Arts Network  and its leader cum Geniocity.com arts blogger, Matt Charboneau. It featured guest speakers Mark Hosler of the band Negativland;  Cleveland-area intellectual-property attorney Sharon Toerek; and Peter Friedman, professor of law at Case Western Reserve and Detroit universities and also Geniocity.com’s law blogger. Hosler spoke about the process and effect of creating Negativland’s audio and video collages from bits of other people’s work. The two legal experts explored the questions of what can be protected by copyright and what can’t, why, and what to do about either scenario.

What bothered me was not the fact that artists and inventors copiously borrow ideas and styles from each other and always have. Building on earlier ideas and discoveries allows inventors to progress farther faster. Influences and allusions add profound cultural value to works of art and serve as a kind of shorthand, efficiently and effectively conveying meaning to an audience or market with shared experiences.

No issue about that here. Ditto the notion of using identifiable snippets of existing works, as Hosler does, to create quite  new and different ones, or satirizing or parodying whole works as Weird Al Yankovic and the National Lampoon have. That’s all good.

What bugs me is bootleggers. These people – I use the term loosely – take artists’ and inventors’ painstakingly imagined and created works, make cheap, usually illegal, direct copies and circulate or sell them, reducing demand for the  originals and income for those whose mental and physical efforts generated them. And they have since art began, making unauthorized folios of Shakespeare’s plays, faking Rembrandts and Picassos and clandestinely taping concerts.  

I know that many artists these days think this is actually just fine – they believe that music or whatever should be free to all, especially now that the Internet exists and none of us can stop the world from getting access to practically everything. They regard all this sharing as free publicity, which it certainly is. But at what point do the sheer love of creating and the thrill of getting known cease to be sufficient benefits to artists who make something for which there is evidently some demand? When do artists and inventors – so often expected to donate their work and be satisfied with a rich soul – deserve to insist that they be paid for their creativity and labor?

It’s hard enough to to turn art or invention into a living without pirates duplicating your unique creation so thoroughly that it becomes as common and monetarily worthless as dirt. As Toerek explained last night, artists can protect their work by copyrighting it, but two facts make this less reassuring. One: officially registering a copyright – the legal process that allows a creator to collect punitive damages from pirates – costs $45 a pop, Toerek said, which may not sound like much unless you’re broke or prolific, like many artists. And two, the fact is that only rich artists can really afford to sue pirates or - coincidentally - to give their work away on the Internet. 

Most of the rest, like any car-part manufacturer or baker – would like to support themselves decently by selling what they make to consumers, whether those consumers are audiences, collectors, shoppers or mass-producers such as publishing houses. 

I’m not saying that the world owes creative people a special living. Like anyone else, they should have to use their skills to compete for gigs, commissions and pay. But also like anyone else, they should have the right to try to create a profitable market for their work. 

They don’t. Not anymore, because the Internet by its very nature discriminates against creators of  original work that can be downloaded and/or mass-duplicated. And unlike Disney or Gucci or U2, most artists can’t do anything about it.

Well – there’s one thing they might be able to try. Hosler explained a bit about Creative Commons, a recent and growing attempt by artists to take back some control of their work by licensing it to people online in return for being credited with authorship.  I don’t get the impression that it will help guarantee artists proper payment,  but it looks like an imaginative start in the right direction.

Creative people in search of access

A bunch of us Clevelanders had an interesting discussion last night down by the Cuyahoga River. 

A crowd of artists and other creative-community members gathered at SPACES, a nonprofit gallery, to hear a panel of local arts journalists talk about how they do their jobs, how the processes and constraints of those jobs have changed in the digital age and the current economy, and what arts people can and should do to get their news and work before the reading/watching/listening public. Sponsored by the COSE Arts Network, the panel included Ideastream (WCPN/90.3 FM  NPR)  “Around Noon” producer Dave DeOreo; Scene magazine arts editor Michael Gill;  Plain Dealer art and architecture critic Steven Litt; and me.

Eventually, the podcast will be available and I’ll provide a link so you can experience the whole wide-ranging discussion. But what interested me the most about it was this sort of collective epiphany the group seemed to have – the realization that, even with the Internet putting public access in reach of anyone with a website, an e-mail account or a social network, it’s clear that gatekeepers still control whose creative work gets widely seen or heard. And that there will always be gatekeepers of some kind, as long as humans have mass communication.  And that that, believe it or not, is a good thing.  

 These days, many of those choosing the information to disseminate are self-appointed. Individuals with little or no training in communications, they blog, they tweet, they post stuff on their personal sites and Facebook pages in a breathtaking and clamorous display of free speech. It’s a heady feeling for all of us to sense that we can reach the entire human race with a few clicks and keystrokes.

But even if every one of us on the planet ends up with a blog someday, most of us likely still won’t have real access to the public. That’s  because access comes through influence, and influence comes from the ability to reach a consistently large number  of people. And what consistently draws a large number of people?

Expertise and useful, reliable, entertaining content. 

What came out during the discussion was that artists and others still want and need the validation of their work that comes from being covered by a reporter, host or critic who really knows something about a field and commands wide public respect because of it.  Which means, in most cases, that media professionals, not citizens journalists, are going to continue to be the  people who decide what gets written or talked about in the media, no matter what form the media take in future.

This is not to imply in any way that there aren’t a lot of knowledgeable, talented  individuals out there whose blogs and tweets are informative and worth reading.  But unless they can build and keep a sizable amount of public  influence, theirs will still be single voices among billions of others on the planet, all vying for attention and each drawing only a handful of followers.

Getting reviewed or featured by one of these communicators won’t get anybody much traction with the general population. Who among the general population has time to search through a billion different amateur or near-amateur news outlets?    

The fact remains that, just as people want trained teachers in their classrooms rather than random  residents of the community, so humanity needs and wants professional critics and news people to separate the worthwhile from the endless amount of mediocrity we have no time to sift through for ourselves. Creative people and those interested in creative work will, as always, often disagree with what gets chosen. They will also always have the right – and, increasingly, the means - to seek out for themselves what they consider excellent.  But to reach the largest number of news consumers who understand and care about  their work, artists and arts communities can’t do better than to work with successful professional media.

Let’s hope some of those media survive.

Improving the survival rate for small businesses

I was talking with a group of small-business people yesterday. A couple of them happened to mention that the great majority of small businesses fail. And that there are a great many reasons why they fail, from insufficient capital to poor planning and bad management.

This got me thinking: There may be nothing anyone can do to prevent a disorganized or dimwitted entrepreneur from destroying his start-up. But why should we all assume that this huge rate of infant-business mortality is inevitable and immutable? 

Why couldn’t the teaching of certain practices and the establishment of helpful programs increase the number of young businesses that survive and thrive the same way that proper nutrition, regular obstetrical check-ups and well-baby examinations help more mothers and infants stay alive?

And why don’t more of our communities see the survival of small businesses as a priority?

I think the answer to all three is: There’s no good reason why small business remains so unsupported. And I think communities everywhere owe it to themselves to get busy and create development programs that will allow more entrepreneurs to succeed.

The arts sector has been leading the way for several years now. Many cities, universities, arts councils and development agencies have recognized that artist-entrepreneurs have enormous potential as creative economic drivers, but need guidance in best business practices and access to resources in order to make their enterprises viable.

Cleveland is one of the nation’s leaders in this, with its unique Artist as an Entrepreneur Institute co-founded and run by the Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE) and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture and also the COSE Arts Network, which provides information, educational opportunities and resources to member artist-entrepreneurs. 

Because of such imaginative efforts, encouragement of arts-based businesses has become a national trend.  

But it shouldn’t be limited to the arts. After all, nearly every business starts small, even those that eventually become giant conglomerates. (Coca-Cola? One pharmacist with a recipe. GE? One tinkerer who invented a lightbulb. Google? Two guys with a computer). The one or two people who start a small business often have a great idea, vision and drive, but relatively little experience with management – and even less money. 

They need guidance, mentoring, moral support, access to investors and bridge loans or grants to help them take that all-important step from struggling to self-sustaining. Perhaps what we need to set up for them – as we do for those needing health care – is community clinics: resource centers where any small-business entrepreneur can go to find all those things and learn to make effective use of them.

Can we let any expectant mother go untutored and uncared-for? Can we justify letting any child be born unhealthy and live unattended? 

Can we afford to let any good idea die? 

No. So let’s get going.