Taking Money From Our Pockets

[mabfan]

Folks who read here regularly know that I have a strong belief in upholding copyright law. Part of it is, admittedly, in my own self interest, as I've created works that have some value to them (or so I'd like to think). I would say that anyone who makes money off their creativity has some vested interest in maintaining certain rights over their work, no matter what they may say aloud.

There's also a certain level of respect for the creator that copyright should imply, but that doesn't always come along with it. A few years back, a man approached me about reprinting "Kaddish for the Last Survivor" for distribution to synagogues during Yom Ha'Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). In his very first email to me, he said that he was offering no money, but that the exposure would be good for me. I pointed out to him that I earn part of my living off of my writing – in fact, there was a time when I had no other source of income – and I suggested that he pay me $100. His response was to say forget it. The irony was that if he had approached me from the start by asking how much I would charge him for the reprint rights, I would have offered the story for free. (A lesson to everyone.) But approaching me as if my work was valuable enough for reprinting and sharing, but not valuable enough to give me recompense, rubbed me the wrong way.

Of course, it could have been worse. He could have run off copies without ever telling me.

The real difficulty comes when people are either ignorant or clueless about copyright. Eric Berlin, who is a playwright among many other things, just shared an incident under the blog post title Dusting off my playwright hat for a moment. A woman who is part of a group putting on his play has invited him to attend the performance. The only problem is, it appears that the group might not have bothered to license the rights. I say "might not" because Berlin notes the possibility that they might have tried to secure the rights but failed, due to the disorganization that exists at Samuel French.

However, assuming the group did in fact not bother securing rights, it puts Berlin in an interesting situation. The young woman who is playing the lead has praised the play very strongly, and any writer would love to hear his words praised in that fashion. But...but. If we don't pay our creative class for their work – if in fact we remain ignorant to the financial value their work should have to them – then what are we as a society saying to them?

Copyright © Michael A. Burstein

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

I wonder why it is that artists (I mean of all varieties, including writers) seem to be the only professionals where people assume they should produce work for no payment. Is it because our work can be so public? Does it make a "connection" to people and therefore they feel like it belongs to them? Or is it because the stereotypical arr-teest thinks getting paid for your art makes you a hack, and a lot of people believe that stereotype?

Of course, being the snark that I can be when I set my mind to it, I also confront these people when I meet them with something along the lines of "I'm very impressed that you do X job for free." When they naturally respond "I don't!", then of course you kick in the part about "Neither do I."

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

Well, there's software, too, and certain components of graphic design (which you may consider art). This is just a theory, but I think it may have to do with the tangible vs. intangible divide. I can touch a shoe, or a car, or a widget, and most people would have second thoughts about transporting any of those out of a sales location without payment. But then some people will turn around and think that if they're able to duplicate software, or rely on someone else's biography research, or play a videotape/DVD of a movie and charge 30 people to attend in order to fund their student group, or play commercial music over the school sound system instead of ringing bells to signal class changes ... why should they have to pay for any of that? They aren't stealing a physical software DVD, or the actual written biography, or the videotape/DVD, or the music CD, so they aren't doing anything wrong, right? There's a systemic lack of regard for intellectual (or any non-physical) labor or property. Many people are very stubborn in their refusal to accept that if they did not create it, they don't automatically own all rights to use it; or that if they buy one format, they don't automatically have all rights to all uses of that format, even those that involve duplication and propagation, even those that reap monetary benefits.

And in (over?)reaction, some companies try to shut down all forms of fair use, and other companies patent genes to ensure they can make money off their research related to the genes ....

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Good point--the more I think about that divide angle, the more it makes sense.
(And I should have thought of software too, considering that I have friends in the industry who complain about this from time to time.)

Not that I would ever want to give up libraries, but I suppose this idea is also encouraged by the fact that we can check out books and videos (and in some places CDs) for free, and that so many books, etc. and so much software is available for free online.

[cellio]

Too many people seem to think that if they're paying for the physical copy (e.g. running off their own photocopies), they aren't really stealing. Oddly, many of those same people would recognize that sneaking into a non-full theatre is theft, even though they could make the same sort of argument (they added no cost).

I've never made my living from music, but I've had enough income from tape/CD sales to have to do tax paperwork. When my group published its first album I gave a copy to a (supposed) friend who had expressed interest. When I next saw her she told me how much she enjoyed it and that she'd run off copies for a bunch of her friends. Um, right. She didn't seem to understand that she had stolen from me and that in the world of small press, that was tangible. She wasn't ripping off RCA and depriving them of a thousandth of a percent of their sales; she was ripping off me to the tune of several percent of the run. It wasn't the money; it was the principle of the thign. Needless to say, I didn't give her later recordings.

[sethg]

The question of artists having a property right in their creations is separate from the question of artists being paid for their work. It's easy to imagine a regime where there is no copyright but artists are paid by the state (as in the old USSR) or by wealthy patrons (as in the Renaissance era). It's even easier (alas) to imagine having a copyright that is indisputably your property but has no market value.

For most property rights that people deal with in their everyday life, the formal rules for "what's legal" are entangled with long-standing cultural norms of "what's fair". E.g., when rents go up precipitously and people feel that landlords are charging "too much", it can lead to the passage of rent-control laws. But between the late 18th century and the invention of the photocopier, the average person didn't have to think about copyright at all; rights were negotiated among artists, publishers, and broadcasters, the development of the law reflected the tug-of-war among these interests, and everyone else just paid retail. Now every individual can be a publisher, but the cultural norms of fairness that the average person has learned don't match the law of copyright that all of a sudden applies to them.