Copywhat?
When I was in Melbourne for EWF I stayed with my friend Pat, who makes amazing comics and thinks amazing things, and we had an unexpected formative conversation about copyright when we were eating cheap Japanese under a speaker in the corner that may or may not have been playing Kanye West. Somehow we got to talking about whether we illegally download content for free.
I said I try not to, unless I know the artist isn’t going to miss the proceeds from my purchase, which is dumb reasoning, because I also have this kind-of Buddhist inkling that stealing shit will bring the bad karma, but also I sympathise with artists because I’d be pissed if someone stole my shit, but this kind of of thinking is waning, after this conversation.
(I also download things I’ve paid for in the past and then lost, such as all the AC/DC albums I had as a teenager. I also have less qualms about downloading from multi-national corporations, but I know this is also stupid: yeah, the companies might not miss the proceeds from my purchase, but the bottom-rung artists will certainly miss the royalties.)
This sort of quasi-ethical consumerism leaves me in a shitty position, because I generally can’t afford to buy all the cool literature and art and entertainment I’d like to, because I work in a poorly paid sector of the publishing economy and I live on my own, so a quarter of my salary goes immediately to rent each week, plus I have expensive habits that I still prioritise because I’m still a recovering bogan.
These are lifestyle choices though, right, and I could quit the drugs and alcohol and the takeaways that come with those, to save money and actually be sober for a while, and I could actually start spending my scant disposable income on things that actually enrich my life, not damage my liver, fuck my short-term memory or leave my neural receptors so coated in gunk they no longer emit endorphins.
Another lifestyle choice I’m on the verge of making is whether I want to make money from my art, or whether I just want it to reach and affect people, because Lawd knows I’m never going to make a living out of the esoteric shit that I write, so why not give it away for free so more people can enjoy it. [Insert Cory Doctorow quote about obscurity here.]
So all of this opens up the question for me of whether I believe in copyright or not, because copyrighting something asserts your ownership of it, and asserting your ownership of something implies that if someone wants to have it, they should pay for that privilege.
But: ‘privilege’. Why should I, or anyone, be the keeper of privilege? I’ve got plenty of privilege. More than enough to share around. My salary sucks, but there’s no denying I’m privileged.
This was the thrust of the conversation I had with Pat. A long time ago stories were told orally, so they couldn’t be owned. You’d hear a story and then pass it on. Maybe you would slap a via @ mention on it, maybe not. Since then, capitalism (I guess) has stipulated that sharing things comes with a price tag, which is a principle I wasn’t told about as a kid: sharing is caring, more like it.
When sharing a story requires a financial transaction you enter troubled territory first alluded to by Thomas Carlyle: if any individual accrues enough of that which is to be shared, they can charge a buttload for it and those who can’t afford it have to do without, especially those who wish to share it: ‘it’ being the privilege to share. Howard’s media-ownership laws illustrate this well enough, but imagine if the same concentration ocurred in the literary-arts economy.
Oh, wait, it already has, which is why we can talk of The Big Five (or Six, depending on who you ask), and why we see shit like the REDgroup fail go down: concentration of media ownership is a bane for cultural diversity, no matter which way you splice it, which is why I’m starting to come round to thinking of a new way of thinking about intellectual-property rights.
Actually it’s not new.
ENTER: CC and the Copyleft movement.
The Creative Commons and Copyleft mobs are two groups I’ve never really understood. I’ve always looked at them with the same sort of wariness I have for self-righteous and indignant vegans: their radical egos seem engorged by principle, devoid of reason – like misguided techno-utopians, perhaps, or like those hippies you’ve lived with who want to go set up a commune in the desert and bask in the glory of their own enlightenment without … well, without sharing that with others.
By that I mean they’ve always seemed like a sort-of enlightened crew, with a progressive mindset they wouldn’t deign to share with the ignorant masses, yours truly included, because I guess I never presented to them as being willing to be receptive to their ideas, because I have this engrained belief that copyright is a virtue, and that we should all be paid for our work.
Felice and Connor spat chips when I mentioned this to them on Twitter. They made disparaging comments about my ‘crazyleft’ ways and used ironic hashtags like #copysorightbilloreillywouldapprove. I had to google that hashtag to figure out what he was on about and, shit Connor, I respect you, but don’t throw me this politically dichotomous bullshit like it’s a case in point. Rush Limbaugh’s an arsehole too, and Andrew Bolt’s deluded, but wah wah wah, don’t come at me with this as though it’s a political matter. It’s ideology we’re talking about here, and I know you’re bigger than politics, so quit the bigotry and let’s talk.
You too, Felice. I know you love DRM and everything, but why? Is it possible you’re clinging to a conservative view of publishing and you don’t want to let go of it because you think Cory Doctorow’s a douchbag? That’s a shitty reason to hold onto an opinion.
Keep in mind here, Dear Readers, that one of my biggest beefs is the insufficient remuneration of authors in this economy of ours, which is all we’ve got to work with right now, which is why doing away with copyright is not the immediate answer, but what devealuing copyright affords us is the opportunity to think about distributing content for reasons other than to make money. Who really thinks they’re going to make money out of this game anyway? So there must be another value currency we can think of.
ENTER: the ideas market.
Before ideas were a commodity they existed in the public domain, free to be enjoyed by all. The public domain is being brought back into vogue in the software industry, with your GNU and and your WordPress getting all up in yer proprietary software and changing the world, and even the Gutenberg name has been reappropriated to give access to (classic) literature to anyone who can afford at least a shitty PC and a free wi-fi connection.
Yeah, most of their authors are dead and their works out of copyright, but why wait until you’re dead seventy years only to find out no one gives a shit anyway? Deal with it, you’re never going to be Shakespeare, because manuscript ideas are like arseholes these days – you’re nothing special, so why not give it away for free and hope that maybe you contribute to the unofficial economy at least, where people might actually just fork out their time to read your shit.
You’re reading this, after all: buy me a beer when we meet IRL if you like, but it’s equally likely I’ll buy you a beer, so really, what are we trying to get out of this if it’s not a royalty cheque or a free beer or maybe a root?
Communion, of course. Secular communion. It should be free, but it’s not, because we’re used to paying for shit, unless it’s on the internet, in which case we jump through all sorts of ethico-logistical steps to justify our stealing from HBO. Well, fuck that. Steal this blog, because it is (un)officially licensed under a [blah blah blah licence] whether Felice or Connor like it or not.
And the reason for that is there seems to be two ways we can set up this economy of ideas: we can allow individuals to accrue buttloads of content and then bundle it with hardware and fuck on the creators; we can do away with the concept of ownership and allow people to share freely and work shitty jobs to fund that activity. Or get grants. Or sugar daddies. Or trust funds. Any sort of benefactor will do.
I happen to have an arts job that pays me a salary, so you’d think I’d be all for the former, but yeah, nah. People will always create, regardless of whether you or I get a salary out of it, and if distribution is unencumbered by capitalist principles then maybe myriad others will share the privilege of consuming that content. Or we can let Walt Disney and the Murdoch/Packer sons control the dissemination. It’s up to us.
We need to think anew about this, because the current system is pissing a lot of people off, even the privileged few. And there’s nothing worse than hearing the privileged few crap on about how fucking hard it is. Why is it hard? Because we want to make a living out of this, which is a stupid idea.
Hrmm. As a visual artist my experience of ‘copyright’ is different. Generally the ‘consumer’ doesn’t pay to view or ‘consume’ visual art. But you do have to pay if you want to republish images to make money from them, or if you want to privately own a physical object. So I am pretty much forced to work a shitty job/get grants unless I make a form of visual art that can be sold to private buyers. Several forms – large sculptures, installations, participatory works, performance works – do not lend themselves to this.
Copyright issues come in a lot when you are dealing with art forms like photography or photographic documentation of other art forms. I have heard a story of a ‘friend of a friend’ walking into Mambo and finding their image on a t-shirt. They contacted Mambo, initially were offered an insulting $1000 clothing voucher, and when they threatened to sue, they were paid out $5000. Similarly, a photographer I know has had friends on holiday in Asia report that they’ve seen her photography on t-shirts in markets.
Anyway my point is that in visual art you really have no choice but to give away the experience of your content for free. What really gets up artist’s noses though is when big companies abuse the rights of people who are sharing images of their work online.
I think your perspective could shine light on how we might come to terms with the fact no one is ever going to buy our esoteric literature. (By ‘esoteric’ I mean it could be straight-up, laconic Australian realism, but it remains marginalised and misunderstood because not enough people haunt the margins for it to be consumed to be understood in the first place.)
When trying to approach their practice with any sort of enthusiasm or hope, how do visual artists accommodate the fact they have to fund their efforts by means other than selling their art? Other than suing Mambo, which seems way worse than doing any sort of shitty job.
Hey R Dawg,
That hashtag was a joke, kid! Do you really think I’d ever agree with Felice on anything?! (Lulz).
He who Lulz last lulz loudest, Connor.
My irony radar must’ve been busted. Sorry for casting peach stones at you.
I was going to write about this as my next or second to next blog post, and I still will publish my own eloquent argument against Copyleft, but here are a few points I was seething over in the mean time, being as I am at work:
1. What you seem to be suggesting is that we simply cannot make money from art (or working in an artistic industry) without being morally bankrupt like Walt Disney or the Murdoch/Paker clan. Is it stupid to want to dedicate your life to something you think is worthwhile (the production of culture) and not have to subsidise this by working job that is comparable to having matches held against your skin? I like eating meat and I like being paid to do something I like. I guess I’m a double shit sellout. At least Connor had the sense to tell me that piracy/offering things for free was a good starting point for an audience who would later financially support you.
2. Relying soley on grant money in order to make art? This is advocating artistic welfare, and I bet there is not enough grant money for every starving writer in the world. And where would this grant money come from – a benevolent government whose citizens have decided to dedicate themselves to the production of art rather than supporting the economy? I can imagine how well that would go down. And some grants and prizes are sponsored by commercial publishing houses, so this source of income will be diminished if their businesses go.
3. Regarding the oral tradition and lack of ownership; was this ‘many years ago’ before the invention of the printing press, maybe? And was it also a time of massive ignorance and feudalism, possibly? Have you considered the massive (positive) cultural and economic changes that have happened since then to necessitate the commercialisation of literature?
4. I’m also surprised that after our many conversations about DRM you believe I’m an advocate for its use. I do not like Cory Doctorow’s ideas about distribution and business, but that does not go hand in hand with a ‘LOCK THAT SHIT DOWN!’ attitude, or a love of DRM. It’s like saying if you’re not Ghandi, you must be Hitler. For the record, I think DRM (particularly territorial DRM) is an incumbent and I would never recommend a publisher use it on their eBooks.
5. I can’t advocate the removal of cultural production from economics as it currently stands. Either everything is worth money or nothing is. You can’t with one hand tell me I shouldn’t have to pay for literature, but on the other tell me I should have to pay for a computer. And if it’s the latter for you (ie: nothing is) I suggest you photocopy Bear Gryll’s book to take with you to the desert because it’s got some pretty great survival tips.
1. That wasn’t the suggestion I was going for: you can be morally enriched and still make money from art, but it’s never going to be much because there is not a large market for art that is morally enriching; self-subsidising your practice with a shitty job is not the only suggestion I offered: a variety of public and private benefactors should step in to make up for the fact the market will not naturally demand morally enriched artistic ‘commodities’.
2. Again, this was not the suggestion I made: you seem to have simplified my argument by applying blinkers to the final suggestions, plural. You know I don’t advocate a literary welfare state. And I know you know grants don’t only come from the government teet. Again, a mixture of public and private benefaction is necessary to make up for a market that won’t pay the bills for an emerging writer regardless of the state of their moral compass.
3. Okay, your scorn/cynicism/sarcasm is showing its true colours now. When did you start relying on rhetorical questions to make your points? Show me the “the massive (positive) cultural and economic changes that have happened since then to necessitate the commercialisation of literature”. “Necessitate the commercialisation of literature”? WTF, Felice? I’m beginning to seriously doubt your objectivity now. Nothing has ‘necessitated’ the commercialisation of literature: the commercialisation of everything includes literature, chicken/egg. Decommercialise it and we might start thinking of ways to disseminate it without the need for a financial transaction.
4. I don’t know what went wrong here: I’m as much of a fence-sitter as you are on this one. Incumbent DRM is a pain in the arse, that’s all I know.
5. *sighs* Nothing in my post was intended to suggest we remove cultural production from economics. That’s stupid. All I’m trying to get across is that if we stop thinking of literature in terms of pure economics, we might start thinking of ways to gradually tease it away from natural (free) markets, which is where it naturally sits anyway: outside of natural markets.
I cannot conceive a way that anyone can make a decent living out of writing or art in our economies. Except for the top five percent who, in Australia, also have to subsidise their writing income with teaching, public speaking and running workshops, etc. Or the ‘middle’ ninety percent who write crappy self-help eBooks, entrepreneurial guides and IT how-tos. The five percent at the bottom who are actually creating the works of great literary merit will always be marginalised in this economy, so we need to figure out an alternative way to remunerate the for their efforts, so they *don’t* have to rely on shitty jobs / tied-up grant rounds / award money / private philanthropy.
I guess a lot of that wasn’t sufficiently expressed in my original post. Either way, I refuse to accept that the only way to remunerate writers and artists is by protecting/retaining/advocating copyright as a hard-and-fast rule. I don’t have a water-tight alternative, but I’d like us to think this through without the pissed-off sarcasm that springs from bigotry.
I think it was mostly this that made me think you wanted to remove literature from economics: ‘we can do away with the concept of ownership and allow people to share freely and work shitty jobs to fund that activity’, ‘Why is it hard? Because we want to make a living out of this, which is a stupid idea.’ This isn’t a statement that leaves much room for alternate interpretations, where ‘this’ is writing/creating literature. If you’re talking about esoteric, marginalised literature, well, where does that begin and end? You’ve decided you’re an esoteric writer who won’t make money from writing, but for others the definition might not come so easily. J K Rowling, who has brought a fuckload of money into the publishing industry as well as to herself, was rejected loads before she found a publisher. If she had given up and decided her books were too esoteric and she should just share them with others for free, which you seem to be encouraging in others not just for yourself, she wouldn’t have any of that money and probably the books themselves would not have reached such a wide audience. I know it’s rare, but the attitude you look like you’re adopting is only a few logical steps away from saying authors generally shouldn’t bother to try to make a living out of writing, which has the knock on effect of removing all literature from the economy.
The reason I used the word ‘necessitate’ is because it’s just that: in a free market, literature is necessarily commercialised. I think arguing otherwise is arguing either against capitalism (which is another point entirely) or arguing for literature to be funded by the government and private benefactors (as you sort of did), which I think would be a bad idea as I can’t imagine it would give rise to more money for more authors. If anything, I imagine it would probably make professional writing more difficult, and distribution to people who aren’t creators harder, and the industry even more parochial. In which case, the communication – the purpose of the industry in the first place – is critically undermined.
I think everything ‘naturally’ sits outside of free markets because a free market is a construction. I’m really not sure what you mean by this…?
It seems like arguments about copyright will always come back to an argument about economics, because copyright was born from the fact that our current economic system is as it is. It’s necessary to protect copyright or else the market could be flooded with versions of a product, (a book, your book) drive the price down, and ultimately make it valueless in terms of its potential to make you an income. I don’t think that there’s a grey area – something is either covered by copyright and has monetary value, or it isn’t and it doesn’t.
So let me get this straight, you are quantifying all literary works as no longer worthy of reimbursement due to the current climate of illegal downloadings and general thievery? That’s like saying in an age of increased rape, we should devalue consent.
Posting that comment is like saying that in an age of increased strawman fallacies we should devalue argumentative logic.
I’m trying to open up the discussion of an alternative value-trading system. Trading things of value does not necessarily mean exchanging money for goods. Most goods that we can buy with money are relatively worthless, and most things that cannot be bought are priceless. You’ve seen the ads.
Alternative value trading system? So what, swap MP3’s for sheep? DVDs for errant philosophies? Literature for promises? Or how about we stick with the tried and true system of monetary equivalence for goods and services rendered? I know, crazy thought, go with what works.
By the very nature of your argument you contradict yourself. “Most goods that we can buy with money are relatively worthless”. What possible definition are you using for that, the goods in question are being paid for. If they were worthless, who would charge, and who would pay? Perhaps it’s simply your cloudy judgement that’s pushing you to intellectually devalue items in order to justify this absurd fantasy you’re currently stumbling through.
If an artist creates a piece of work that is worth it’s weight, it will be sold, and people will buy. Of course there is marketing and exposure to take into account, but on the face of it, this is an important enough dynamic to not be removed because some people don’t see the value of artistic work, or seek to circumvent the retail system.
Wait, one more thing. I don’t see how charging a buttload of money for something is a drain on cultural diversity.
I also don’t think that even the big 6 charge a buttload of anything for anything. If they did, surely they’d be rolling in money. But I can tell you, they’re not. They still underpay and overwork their staff, like everyone else.
I really must have fucked up with this post, because I don’t think “charging a buttload of money for something is a drain on cultural diversity”. You’re right: I know there isn’t a publisher in the world that is rolling in money.
If anything, what drains cultural diversity is when private corporations can amass things and sell them on to consumers at a bulk-cheap rate while smaller producers have to charge more to make up for the lack of units moved. There’s gotta be a middle ground, but the invisible hand isn’t going to sweep through and provide so long as consumers can get things cheap from the first big producer they see passing them on a bus.
I have to agree with Felice on this point: “Either everything is worth money or nothing is.” That’s the way our society works. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another argument entirely.
For me (and I have a vague recollection of rabbiting on about this to you at EWF) the bothersome thing is not that there’s a monetary value placed on works of art or literature, it’s the kind of thing that Chloe mentions: big companies taking advantage of smaller players, and using copyright law to protect their I’m-already-very-nicely-paid-thanks interests. That said, if it weren’t for some of these big companies, the ideas (stories, images, artefacts…) themselves would struggle a whole lot more to make their way to an audience.
I briefly studied media and communications law in my undergraduate degree, and copyright law was by far the most interesting aspect of that. At that time the big focus in intellectual property arguments was music. Record companies were freaking out about illegal downloads, suing all over the place. In some research that I did (I’ve probably still got it somewhere, actually) most commentary pointed out that the biggest problem was that copyright laws hadn’t caught up to a rapidly changing industry. Many of these big companies were formed well before these technological advancements were a twinkle, and their business models were struggling to keep up with those changes.
The original Copyright Act was finalised in 1962. I think it’s safe to say that things have changed a little since then. As far as I can see (quickly looking now), the last amendment to that Act was in 2006, and acknowledges “the need for copyright to keep pace with developments in technology and rapidly changing consumer behaviour”.
The thing to notice here, and what pissed me off so much at the time, is that the loudest protesters were the big record companies, not the musicians themselves. With some exceptions, from the musicians themselves there was either silence or a timid assertion that people downloading their music for free was good exposure. They make very little money from royalties anyway — the record companies just ensure that the the music gets recorded in the first place. (I’m over-simplifying, I know.)
Which of course brings us right back to the beginning: writing (music or literature… or creating art etc etc) takes time, and people need to be paid for their time if they’re going to be able to function in a society in which everything is valued fiscally.
If literature has a social function — and I think we agree that it does — then I think it needs to be valued similarly to other things that perform a social function. But I say all of this having consciously decided to find another way to make money (in my case, a rather stupid choice, because yoga teaching doesn’t exactly bring in the big bucks), because I know I’ll probably never make a living from writing.
Sophie, that is exactly the argument I was alluding to in this post. Like a drunk at the pub.
I understand somewhere in my struggling little liver (where all good ideas turn to excrement) that copyright law has not kept up with developments in technology. Shit, the people who use technology can barely keep up. Applying copyright law from the 60s to technologies created in the 80s/90s and only beginning to be adopted with anything approaching vigour in the 10s is bound to cause a disconnect. The funding bodies of the 70s have been equally slow at adapting, as have the publishing houses going right back through the last few centuries.
What we’re dealing with now does not fit easily into the boxes they forged, but what the hell do we do about this? I’m also on the verge of getting out of the industry and entering that world where I earn a living doing something other than my primary passion, and it’s partly because I’m beginning to realise that an already ailing and marginalised market is going through some serious turmoil that’s making me feel as disillusioned as all get out. I guess that explains why I jumped at these ideas of Pat’s about an alternative market of ideas.
As for the large corporations thing, I understand we need them to move commodities around at a mass rate, but I doubt that our stories would not find a way through the ideas market if we didn’t have big corporations to rely on. The ‘many years ago’ that I was referring to, Felice (if you’ve got this far without fuming into a seizure), illustrates this well, I think:
stories moved from tribe to tribe like information moves between nodes on the internet: small bits of data travelling between myriad points, to make up the web as we know it. That’s the sort of culture I’m trying to imagine here: one with millions and millions of tiny little nodes, starting at the local and spreading to the global as the good bits float to the top. When we have large corporations controlling the dissemination of information/stories/knowledge/ideas, all of those little nodes atrophy as the corporations take the customers (who breathe life into them) away from them and only a small group of societies’ ideas are represented in the ideas market.
Now, yes, those times were characterised by feudal wars and state-ordained misogyny, but what if we could combine that approach to storytelling with our existing commercial infrastructure and our ‘enlightened’ cultural values? If we started moving back to this mode of storytelling, we wouldn’t necessarily regress to the Middle Ages: we’d take our best current model with us, and combine it with the best of the previous models through history.
I know that’s some sort of spooty conservative-progressive hybrid, but what’s progress if it’s not thinking with our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds?
Okay… actually, I *do* agree with Felice here! I totally do! Hell has frozen over and all that.
I think the problem is that you seem to be focussing really hard on a few case studies (the fact that some people pirate, that the ebook market is used to bolster the power of device makers etc) and generalising from the part to the whole. The print publishing industry was constrictive, in that, owing to relatively high barriers to entry and the difficulties of wide-scale distribution, there were only so many ways you could do things. In the digital sphere, though, I think there’s room for piracy, high-cost and low-cost (and free!) ebooks, high-brow and low-brow titles, self-publishing, as well as different forms of licensing for that content.
Of course I’m generalising: what else is there right now? But I hoped I was generalising in a direction other than that which you’ve suggested. I hope some of the replies above illuminate that direction with sobriety, but I’m confused about how you’ve taken my generalisations to the implications that print v. digital publishing is less or more restrictive. I absolutely agree that digital publishing accommodates piracy in a way print publishing never could, but I think that’s nearer to what I’m try to say: if piracy is inevitable, don’t we have to think of a new way to be remunerated for the value of the work that we’re trading?
…you haven’t read ‘Atlas Shrugged’, have you…
Please imbue your ambiguous comment with more irony so my hipster brain can compute its relevance to this post.
I see Felice has posted a rebuttal to this piece, and I haven’t yet responded to these comments, so I’m going to to that first, in something approximating a useful order, because I can only contain the fragments of one side of an argument in my mind at one time.
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