No more ripping into RiP!

This is a great article. Many thanks for taking the time to post it here, Brett. A friend sent me a copy last week; this has encouraged me to read it again. As much as time and space permits, here’s my take on it.

As an aside, I hope it’s clear – and perhaps I’ve not helped myself by being ideologically opaque in earlier posts – that if there is a choice between free culture and corporate controlled culture, I infinitely prefer the former! In this, I am on the side of you, Girl Talk, not to mention the NFB –as a public provider of culture that can steer clear of commercial interests.

Alright, down to Lehem – to whom I hesitate to give “authorship” for the article since it seems to contradict the spirit of his project. Nevertheless, it will certainly make things easier if I use his name.

Lehem says, “If I were to tell you that pirating DVDs or downloading music is in no way different from loaning a friend a book, my own arguments would be as ethically bankrupt as the MPAA’s. The truth lies somewhere in the vast gray area between these two overstated positions.”

Not sure that RiP! acknowledged any gray area, as Lehem did.

Lehem goes on:

“For a car or a handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of ‘intellectual property’ leaves the original untouched.”

In the case of a remix, literary equivalents of which Lehem elaborated on at length earlier in the article, it’s not always true that the original is untouched. To the eventual recipient of the remixed cultural artefact, the message of the original might be entirely lost. What about Microsoft having recreated a scene from RiP!?I’d be pissed if anything like that happened to me. Sure, the original artefact is unchanged, but if the altered copy eventually reaches more people, I’d say its intended purpose has been harmed. RiP! is an awareness-raising work about copyright; Microsoft is an awareness-raising work about Microsoft; put them into the market together, and it could be argued that the success of one is at the expense of the other.

Back to the handbag-versus-book argument of Lehem’s: appropriation potentially leaves the creator unable to earn a living from his/her creation. Not necessarily a bad thing in every case, but unless we actually know each case, how can we say it’s a victimless crime?

As I’m sure everyone here is aware, thousands of journalists – many of whom paid good money to go to school, and were subsidized out of the public purse, and accumulated considerable valuable work experience – they are currently losing their jobs. And it’s not because the public saw no value in what they do. The public appears to see great value in what they do. Thanks to the Internet, the NY Times, among others, reaches millions more readers than through its print edition alone. But it’s certainly cause for concern that news, which is clearly in the public interest, and serves an ever-growing appetite, is going bankrupt.

Of course, we can all have a snicker at “dinosaur” industries that can’t or won’t adapt to a new reality. But the fact remains that everyone has to pay the bills; artists and journalists alike. Sure, distribution is cheaper via Internet than, say, a printing press. But you’ve still got to pay programmers, designers – not to mention that you need to pay people to actually go down and hunt down the truth to the best of their abilities.

I don’t see the argument being much different for art. Sure, it’s in everyone’s best interests that we get access to it; moreover, everyone clearly wants it. But a lot of art requires substantial capital investment to get made, and this is unlikely to ever change. Unless we really do want to break all the unions, professional associations, guilds and suchlike – who not only seek fair pay for a fair day’s work, but also often act as an arbiter of quality – I can’t see how we , in fairness, can leave the question of revenue out of it.

There is not simply some amorphous public with a craving for art & ideas versus Big Bad Corporations. The question of labour is inextricable from the debate. I don’t expect my hairdresser to give me a free haircut, and yet, especially given the difficult raw materials he has to work with, I’d say he’s an artist!