I don’t know if you, dear reader, have ever noticed or if you even care that this blog, my website, and all of my photos on flickr are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. That means you may disseminate my work electronically or in print as long as you attribute me, and you don’t reproduce the work for commercial gain. It also means that if you wish to make something new using my work, you may do so non-commercially and as long as you license your work under the same CC license.
This particular forum isn’t necessarily the best place for a lengthy discussion of the problem with current copyright law, but it isn’t not the best place either. In other words, what better place? It won’t be lengthy. I promise.
It seems to me (and a lot of other people) that only one thing is being achieved by our country’s draconian copyright laws, our desire to retain and/or squeeze every last penny out of works of art, as well as certain corporation’s/association’s drive to sue virtually everyone who has ever even listened to or glanced at something shared: the stifling of culture. There is a fantastic article by Jonathan Lethem in the February 2007, issue of Harper’s magazine about influence, collage culture, and borrowing, which says, among other things, “The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism.” And it’s true: Where would we be culturally if Billy Shakespeare hadn’t borrowed plots from the Greeks and Romans, or if Public Enemy hadn’t borrowed beats from P-Funk? If I attempted to trace all of my influences, all of my borrowings–or if I tried to undo the (unintentional) collages I’ve made, and put them back into their original configurations, I would end up spending all of my time doing that, and none of my time creating new things. I would cease being an artist and become a full-time bureaucrat for myself. I must admit, however, that the phrase “a bureaucracy of Shawn” has an appealing ring to it.
So now you know my stance, and you’re probably asking yourself, “Why do I care about this?” The answer is this: If everyone followed current copyright law, videos like the following would never be made, and that would be a tragedy.
