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.