Wk1 Reading: Copyright--Can We Return to the Intention?

           When I teach about the Renaissance, and the subsequent expansion of those activities we consider “culture,” I always try to leave my students with an understanding of the dynamic between creativity and prosperity:  people who have to expend all their time and effort trying not to die of starvation before next week don’t have too much left over to devote to artistic endeavor.  On the other hand, contributing to the survival of one’s family gives one a sense of purpose and value that kids in our society don’t—well, thank God!—get much opportunity to achieve.  So, since every human requires a sense of purpose and value to thrive, our kids have to get that somewhere else, and it’s not surprising they turn to artistic endeavor.

            Nor is it surprising that such a proliferation inevitably becomes recursive.  As earlier persons connected through their joint struggle for survival, today’s persons connect through the interactiveness of those artistic endeavors.  Like any interaction, one participant takes the output of the other and internalizes it, and elaborates on it, and tosses that elaboration back for further interaction.

            So when someone achieves their sense of purpose and value by acquisition, rather than contribution, that fertile interactive dynamic gets short circuited.  People get territorial.  Grasping.  Lawyered up.

            Of all the videos, I liked Larry Lessig’s the best, because he promulgates an approach encompassing respect both for those who produce now and those who produced before, as well as that paradoxically ephemeral commodity, common sense.  Like the gentleman from the Jamaican music company, he recognizes that the massive interconnectivity of our world requires a different SOP from one in which few producers (“writers”) create for passive consumers (“readers”). 

            On the other hand, how much less grasping is it to wish to possess another’s creative product without returning acknowledgement—and I don’t just mean by putting their name on it!  I disagree with those who said it’s human nature to take the opportunity to grab something for free if one can; I find most people have an instinct to pay to acquire the work of their neighbors.  And the internet, as we have experienced so richly this year, makes everybody neighbors.  We don’t takeour neighbors’ property if it’s left where we can reach it.  That’s called stealing.

            So while there may be for some forms of art, as with music, an industrial framework that is decrepit and will inevitably collapse under its own weight, there is also a societal necessity to create a cultural framework that both honors and supports artistic endeavor.  This, I learned over these days, was the original intention of copyright law.  When circumstances pressure a law out of its original intention, it’s time for common sense to “revolt,” and that time for this law has surely come.  Let’s not steal from one another, but let’s allow people and art to interact with one another in ways that enrich our culture by encouraging each other to find purpose and value by contributing artistic endeavors to our society.