As an aside, I think it's just awful that you can't take pictures of your goodies and email them to people without expecting those pictures to pop up on some website somewhere - I also think it's terrible that I can't eat broken glass and jump off the top of tall buildings - this isn't a right/wrong point, it's a succeed/fail point.
Bold and red, like revolution!
Now concerning intellectual property: speaking as an artist, I'm always torn between saying "Information for All!" and its alternative, "Bitch Better Have my Money!" This leaves me in the precarious position of wanting to produce creative products, and be remunerated for those products, without depriving anyone of those products. You may recognize this as not being like an actual profit or production model, and being more like hoping money will just sort of float in my general direction as I write.
But here's the thing: I don't really care if it does. If you told me today that I had to pay to write (and technically, when you consider that I shell out cash every 3 months for my web hosting, I do), I would still be at my keyboard tomorrow. I think most real writers would do the same. I think the same applies for plastic artists, musicians, computer programmers, hell - anyone who really cares about what they do, whatever it is.
The people who produce an manage artists, in some evident cases, do not do it for the love. The music business is a business. So is the movie business. Even the book business, such as it is. Producers of artistic works see artistic talent as a sort of mine - they secure the property rights, tap the resource, and do their damnedest to shoot any trespassers. What they're actually producing is of no consequence - books, records, widgets, it doesn't matter so long as product flows out and cash flows in. This is, fiscally, good business sense.
But does it love you back?
Now, I'm not the world's biggest Robert Heinlein fan, but I've read a few of his books, and one of his scenes I've always liked comes from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In the scene, there's a complaint that a bunch of scientists won't surrender to the revolutionary lunar government, even on threat of death. Someone gets the bright idea to threaten not their lives, but their work, and the scientists turn over in short order.
This to me is the definition of artistic integrity - it doesn't necessarily mean you'll jump on a sword for it, but it means you're making something that you are by minutes and hours dying for. Whatever you create outlives you because, like young Ashley's booby pictures, the artifact is forever.
Consider the Lascaux cave paintings - they are 17,000 years old. The great, great, great grandchildren of the great, great, great grandchildren of the great, great, great grandchildren of whoever painted them turned to dust so long ago that my own great, great, great grandfather's great, great, great grandfather was still over 1,000 years removed from their lives and yet, the artifact remains.
Cormack McCarthy's rough draft for All the Pretty Horses
The Lascaux cave paintings were made on shared wall space. For generations, people came and went, scratched things out, added new things in, until eventually they abandoned the cave and were probably murdered by Palasgian raiders or dropped dead of some brutal prehistoric disease. Basically, Lascaux was like the Wikipedia or the upper stone age.
The paintings were significant to their creators, and presumably to the viewers, and now they are significant to us, but they are only significant to us because we have them. How many other similar works of art have not survived the ravages of time? How many careful and meaningful creations turned to dust within a few years, decades, or generations of their makers?
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
And this, circumlocutiously, is why copyright and information retention politics and policies, suck.
There's all kinds of things to be said about how a tight-knit band of Hollywood lawyers are clutching to a dead business model and suing the pants off of poor kids who just want to listen to a Brittney Spears album, and it's all true and it's all nasty, but it's been said before by sharper tongues than mine and it's only partially the bone I have to pick.
I find the idea of owning an idea destructive to the artist and to the culture. When you try to say that your intellectual property is not game for fair or educational use or parody, you are cutting off areas of expression. Are IP retentionists so sheltered as to have not heard that there is no such thing as bad publicity? Egad, when someone is stealing what you've made, it means they like what you've made! When people are making fun of you, at least they must have heard of you!
This used to be how a band knew they'd made it
However - someone is going to get paid off of intellectual property because, in my experience, the culture's condition concerning IP is very similar to its condition concerning guns - good luck getting rid of the existing structure. In other words, good luck gutting the arts and entertainment industries of their cash-driven model in the name of free thought and principle.
And because money talks and bullshit walks, I think that if an artistic commodity is to be exchanged, then it is the artist who should profit. I think that some manner of intellectual property identity is the tool for the job. If I make a painting and then you crop it and make a T-shirt off of it, I probably ought to get at least a nod for my effort, even if I didn't make the original painting for money. However - DRM is crippleware and copyright as written grants excessive, constrictive, and evidently abusable rights to the rights holder.
I don't have a good answer - sorry if you read all this thinking I did. I want to have my cake and eat it too, and that being the case I've kind of built an academic Catch-22 for myself. Trollface dot jpeg.
I think all artists should be shot on sight LOL dongs
First, any artist working today should look into alternative copyright, like (but not limited to) Creative Commons. These licenses make various allowances for commercial, non-commercial, and educational usage that allow the IP owner to make money off his or her work if and as desired while still not being a complete douchenozzle about it. Remember that as soon as you create something, it is copywritten. Enforceability is a different matter, and that's why alternative copyright is worth looking in to.
Second, embrace proliferation. If people are stealing your work, that means it's good. If they're stealing more than they're buying, that mean's it's good and it's overpriced. Forced cultural tropes (like pop stars and big Hollywood movies) have to be controlled and sold - yours doesn't have to be like that. You can be balance pecuniary necessity and artistic integrity by charging those who are able and willing to pay, and by providing your thoughts and ideas to people who need them, or who can do better things with them. You can also use alternative licensing to make sure everyone can access your work while at the same time making sure NOBODY makes any money off of it at all if that's what's gonna get you through the day.
Finally, think of the dandelion (links to a loooong article by Cory Doctorow, who is significantly better versed and more articulate in this matter than I am) - it dumps a buttload of seeds into the air. Most of them die - maybe 1 per flower takes root and grows, but it's enough. The species thrives.
Now think of the Panda - it mates carefully, selectively, and rarely, and the species is only alive now because we find them more adorable than delicious. Which species, the dandelion or the panda, do you think will be around in 1,000 years?
They live and die at the pleasure of the powerful - would you want the same for your art?
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