Creativity, Culture, and the Future of Ideas

This is somewhat rambling, and I had to write this down before I lose it. It hasn’t been lost on me that my kids, their friends, and most likely everyone between 12~25 break copyright law. Daily. It’s rarely a case of ignorance, they know what’s illegal for the most part. They are also very creative, and the tools that technology brings offers tremendous opportunities for creative expression. Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, and other places are full of mashups (remixes of audio, video, stills), some surprisingly good, that are filled with copyrighted content. What’s wrong with these kids, and why do they think they can steal? And then it hit me. They live in a sea of content, virtually none of which is accessible (legally) for their creative urges. All us us create and learn on top of what we already know. So they take anyway. The result is that our culture is, thanks to shifts in the copyright law, largely being denied to them. They live in a world full of words, music, movies & video that they can’t access for their creative outlets. It's 'Read-Only', without permission for reproduction or further use, no matter how small. There is no fair use. So they ignore it. But even if a law is bad, or irrelevant in today’s society, simply ignoring the law as a whole generation are currently doing has a corrosive effect. We need copyright reform, desperately.

Almost without exception, new ideas and creations of every kind such as those expressed in art, writing, music, research, etc., aren’t entirely new. Instead they are additions and refinements of ideas and creations from our past. To build upon what we already know about the world around us is innate human nature. It’s how we learn.

The collective products of this creativity in a given society forms what we call culture. To ensure development and progress, every successful society needs access to their culture. Without access (or restricting access to few), a societies people are cut off from building upon their collective base of knowledge. Placing burdens to progress in their chosen fields, from art and architecture, business and healthcare, and everything in-between. Societies with these kinds of barriers to progress face real risk of stagnation and failure.

Enter Copyright law. In 1978 Congress made a radical change to copyright law by making it an “opt-out” system. Whereby every doodle, writing, photograph, song, had automatic protection under this law. Before 1978 and tracing back to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, it was an “opt-in” system where owners had to register their works to gain the protection of copyright law. It is important to understand that before 1978, a vast amount of creative works were never registered and became part of the Public Domain immediately. After 1978 the Public Domain effectively disappeared. All works were automatically copyrighted with no clear legal way to give up copyright protection. Before 1978 copyright law regulated few (only those with commercial interests) and didn’t effect ordinary citizens. After 1978, copyright law effected everyone.

Enter the digital age. Copyright regulates copies, and in the digital world where every use necessarily creates a copy, even ordinary citizens collide with copyright law on a daily basis. Bluntly stated, under this burden of copyright law we are making criminals out of many of us, including virtually an entire generation of young people. But make no mistake, it is a burden to all of us. The creative tools of our digital age aren’t going to go away and will only get better, and very few are able to afford the $150,000 per infringement penalties under the law. In addition, there is a price paid when laws are ignored on a wholesale basis. So instead of the RIAA abusing our legal system with a flood of lawsuits (including grandmothers, deceased individuals, & even a network printer located somewhere at Indiana University), we need rational minds to reform copyright law. The alternative is to live with what we have now, an inefficient copyright system with policies that have fostered a permission based culture, tightly controlling use, with tendencies to stifle creativity and lock out the majority of created works (the orphan works). Increasingly limiting use (think DRM), and curtailing fair use.

Comments

[Jeff]

*NOTE: The comments below are refugees from a previous iWeb account.

julia f:
Very interesting article, and quite a tough nut to crack
Monday, March 2, 2009 - 01:00 PM

Thomas Detrich:
Creative Commons is one way for for content creators to allow sharing of works without the burden of copyright law impinging on users.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 09:31 AM