It’s time to get philosophical on garage networks so sit down, grow a beard, put on a black turtleneck and try and maintain some world weariness ferchrissakes.
The blog’s title The Financial Incentive to Create is one of the central underpinnings of copyright (the concept that is, not my actual post title - that would be weird). This concept is best put forward by the U.S constitution.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
from wikipedia
Or in other words, allowing for significant financial gain for the creator of the work to encourage further creation.
This is a favoured area of study for particularly sadistic economists I imagine they become terrible dinner party conversation as a result.
I’m being mean.
It’s a fine notion to try and find out the exact incentive needed for creators to continue to create effectively, especially when discussing things like copyright extensions and the like (Milton Friedman thought so when he weighed into the Eldred v Ashcroft case and he’s no-one’s bitch). But I feel it’s just weird. And this whole copyright thing is kind of weird. Because it’s left in the hands of people like Milton Friedman and Lawrence Lessig and Jack Valenti and Metallica (try as you might, after seeing Some Kind of Monster you can’t convince me they’re artists).
- What the protectionist wave of copyright (RIAA, Valenti etc.) likes to argue is that unless there’s a big fat paycheck at the end of road, people aren’t going to create.
- What economists do is make complex graphs of how people create and how long they need to be creating for under certain socio-economic conditions before they can’t create any longer or something like that.
- What Copyright activists put forward is a Helen Lovejoy ‘Won’t somebody think of the children!’ approach to creativity which sends people off into imagining an Orwellian future where the RIAA will tear into your house and drag you away for sampling Ben Lee’s latest album (I have no idea why you’d be doing this by the way. Maybe that does give them cause to drag you away). Making creativity therefore dead.
I feel that’s what being lost in this web of laws, legislation, cases and graphs is that people just create. For no incentive, often with no idea that their little song or movie will make money and usually only for the benefit of a few friends. No-one expects a pay check, when one comes it’s nice and when a record executive knocks on your door, you generally freak the hell out and then wake up twenty years later in drug induced haze. At least that’s what movies have taught me.
Copyright is a system of laws to regulate how people distribute their ideas. But, normal people (as opposed to the entertainment industry) don’t give a shit. Most people when they write a song don’t immediately call up a lawyer, or demand a statutory license if someone wants to cover their song or even consider these issues when they create.
Creativity and its incentive is the issue here. I’m not denying that there’s an economy for creative works, far from it. But it’s wrong to naturally tag on an economic incentive to people making things and then argue that unless their argument gets through creativity will just stop dead in its tracks. I call bullshit.
EDIT: I didn’t get really philosophical but more ranty - I’ve read to much.
