Tag Archives: Campaign against copyright for artists

If Silicon Valley knew any history, would it be encouraging the destruction of artistic copyright — as energetically as it fights infringements of technology patents?

. Artists writers and money . , , , ,
‘Venus and Cupid,’ Cranach the Elder, 1509

German artists of the Renaissance, inspired by Italy, took off in other directions: ‘Venus and Cupid,’ Cranach the Elder, 1509

There is something wonderfully right about a son of Italy, Federico Faggin, being the designer of the ur-ancestor of the miniature electronic brains at the core of our computers, tablets, and every other intelligent device in our nearly all-digital, all-wired existence.

Italy was the first place in Europe to experience the damburst of transformative creativity we call the Renaissance. The worship of invention and innovation that defines Silicon Valley is easily traced across six centuries to Veneto, the region in which Federico, the architect of the first commercial microprocessor, was born in 1941– with today’s date on his birth certificate. Vicenza, the town on that document, is famous as the home and chief showplace of the work of Andrea Palladio, the most influential architect of the Renaissance and, experts say, Western architectural tradition. We have been amused to discover, in looking up his lifespan, that yesterday was Palladio’s birthday – in 1508.

None of these are connections we have ever heard anyone in Silicon Valley make – even if Federico is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Vicenza. Why, you might ask, do they need making? Why should geniuses frantically multitasking to design our collective future stop to trace the antecedents of their grand enterprise?

Well, we were dismayed by the green light a U.S. federal judge gave Google last month, which lets the search engine leader continue to scan and upload millions of books online. It can do this without paying living authors of any of those print originals a cent for the free access it gives any web surfer to sections of the texts. This, as Google insists and the judge accepted, is an important act of cultural generosity. All very well, we agree, until you consider that it allows Google itself, already one of the world’s richest companies, to grow even richer from selling advertising space in its vast library of scanned texts, Google Books – while making no contribution to easing the notorious financial uncertainty of book-writing, or reversing the comprehensive destruction by the digital revolution of too many struggling writers’ livelihoods.

Google’s defence for this seeming callousness is all tied up with the scholar Lawrence Lessig’s insistence – enshrined in the ‘free culture’ movement – that loosening copyright laws will permit more ‘sharing’ of artistic and original works and a flowering of collective creativity; conversely, that the enforcement of traditional copyright blocks such creativity.

Too many of his ardent disciples are also apt to parrot the notion that all creativity is ultimately derivative and builds on the work of others. Fair enough, until that truism is wielded as a club, justifying the smashing of an artist’s right to earn income from the labour of shaping derivative inspiration. This argument is particularly unwelcome from anyone working in, say, Google – famous for its ferocious secrecy about its equivalent of Coca-Cola’s secret recipe, the algorithms on which its search engine runs. These are thickly enmeshed in protective patents. There is incontrovertible proof of the company’s recognition of intellectual property rights – but only in its own sphere, technology, where it follows the conventions for acknowledging in cash its indebtedness for creative opportunities. Google has for years been paying royalties to Stanford, the university where its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed the algorithm they used to set up shop – a total of $337 million so far.

If Silicon Valley-ites knew their history, would Lessig’s wish to dilute if not dismantle copyright have proved so popular? Technologists know enough about the importance of the Renaissance for Bill Gates to have snapped up Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex for $30 million in 1994. But do they realise that the expression of personal, individual creativity was the key to that revolution? That in the Renaissance, artists were liberated from the constraining group-think and rigid rules of minds enslaved to medieval church doctrine?

Giorgio Vasari, a painter of that era and also the first historian of Italian art is said by the historian John Hale to have looked for maniera – the manner in which an artist expressed himself, a novelty after the Middle Ages’ convention of anonymous stonemasons toiling on great Gothic cathedrals, humbly suppressing their individuality in the service of God.

That individuality was of the essence of the Renaissance was also discernible in the way each country – and individual artists in it – reinterpreted the marvellous innovations in Italy in its own way. As Hale put it, ‘Whatever was made in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries … met two major obstacles: personal genius and shared temperament – the stereotypes of national character …’. This accounts, for instance, for the strikingly different treatment of the female subjects of the German painter Lucas Cranach (1442-1573), whose ‘Venus Restraining Cupid’ Hale calls ‘the first frontally nude goddess in German art.’

Technologists need to help artists to prosper from the expression of their individual visions. In the eight years Google spent fighting the legal battle over its book-scanning, couldn’t it have found a way to use its clout and brilliant inventiveness to establish micropayments as a way to compensate artists, writers and musicians – the way Amazon has taken online retailing from a futurist’s pipe dream to everyday reality?

… We must note in closing that in years of delightful conversations with Federico and his lovely wife Elvia – also born in Vicenza, and whom he considers indispensable to his achievements in Silicon Valley – he has never sought any reflected glory from the Renaissance, nor drawn any attention to Palladio’s stamp on the appearance of his birthplace. His modesty is exemplary. Still, we doubt that he would disagree with this entry in post-Gutenberg, his eldest child being not a technologist but a painter … of whom we will reveal just a little more, anon.

Buon compleanno, Federico!

BLUE BACKDROP faggin

Does copyright law turn art into commodities? part 1: an answer with help from Albrecht Dürer, ARTICLE19, Salman Rushdie and Anthony Storr

. Artists writers and money, Blogging and bloggers, Culture after Gutenberg, Micropayments . , , , , , ,
Artists who can control copying with copyright have more creative freedom - photograph by postgutenberg@gmail.com

Artists who can control copying with copyright have more creative freedom
– photograph by postgutenberg@gmail.com

Albrecht Dürer: self-portrait, aged 13

Albrecht Dürer: self-portrait, aged 13

How does newness enter the world?

Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie, 2012

Dear Copyright-Haters,

How about picketing Tupperware?  Yes, … we are perfectly serious. Imagine the Facebook updates of yourselves holding giant sock-it-to-‘em placards shouting, ‘STOP COMMODIFICATION NOW!’ … What’s that? … Right. How, you ask, would you store your left-over microwaveable meals in this post-cooking age without plastic boxes so much alike that, even with brand names, they are virtual commodities? You could try porcelain bowls covered with plates or tin foil for an alternative – but no, you say, no one does that any more … muttering to yourselves, inaudibly, ‘Idiot!’

We’ve been hearing that you hate commodification. After last week’s post with Jaron Lanier warning about the consequences for other professions of destroying artists’ rights to control the use of their work, a friend emailed us to say that enemies of copyright are not playing Scrooge when you refuse to contribute even micropayments to enjoy art. (Most of you agree merrily with, eg., the blithe prediction by the editor of Wired: ‘ I think most music will soon be free, …’).

The problem, this friend explained, is that you fear the commodification of the arts. We have heard similar thoughts expressed as, more or less, this: ‘Why should a musician get to charge every time he or she sells a replica of a single performance on cheap plastic CDs over and over again – and get obscenely rich from the proceeds, in some cases?’ Well. Just as a thought experiment, how about putting music CDs lower down on your hit list and starting with obvious horrors – those containers made of processed petroleum, clogging landfill in their millions? One day last month, Tupperware’s share price went rocketing into the heavens – hitting ‘a new 52-week high,’ we noticed. Now, that’s encouragement for commodification!

Why pick on artists instead of finding some way to hijack the profits from  (comparatively) mindless replication elsewhere? The new digital technologies were supposed to relieve some of the pain and hardship behind the centuries-old ‘starving artist’ cliché. They introduced the possibility of financial independence for more artists than ever before — linked to their ability to control how they work, and own the results. By, for instance, recording and distributing their own musical performances; or publishing or exhibiting their e-books, paintings, sculpture, and so on.

On the blog of The New York Review of Books, there is a perfect example from medieval Europe of an artist using new technology as an aid and spur to artistic independence, creativity and an evolutionary leap in drawing and painting. About the sublime German, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), whom the Wikipedia reasonably pegs as ‘the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance,’ the NYRB blogger Andrew Butterfield writes:

Dürer was perhaps the first artist in history to work primarily at his own direction, rather than on commission and at the pleasure of princes and other exigent patrons. The change was made possible by his concentration on printmaking rather than painting as his main artistic and commercial endeavor. Most paintings of this time, such as altarpieces, were made for well-established religious or civic purposes, and the patrons and other viewers had specific needs and strong expectations regarding both what was depicted and how it was represented. But printmaking was a completely new medium, little beholden to tradition. Even when treating Biblical themes, Dürer was comparatively free to pursue a more personal investigation of subject matter.

The painters of Dürer’s time who specialised in portraiture worked like – shall we say, analogue precursors of photo-editing software, who did all the retouching in the act of image-creation rather than after it. The most talented of them could grow rich themselves by following the conventions for flattering their powerful, wealthy subjects in oils – but with their creativity as constrained as the ‘lotus feet’ tortured into existence by foot-binding. Printmaking allowed Dürer  to flout those rules to develop an entirely new, realistic style in portraiture:

Typically portraiture was honorific and meant to represent the exemplary virtues of the person shown; Dürer instead often sought to capture the idiosyncratic and psychological characteristics of the people he portrayed. He was fascinated with the close scrutiny of dark and brooding emotion.

The Wikipedia explains the effect of his independence:

Dürer exerted a huge influence on the artists of succeeding generations, especially in printmaking, the medium through which his contemporaries mostly experienced his art, as his paintings were predominately in private collections located in only a few cities. His success in spreading his reputation across Europe through prints were undoubtedly an inspiration for major artists such as Raphael, Titian, and Parmigianino, all of whom collaborated with printmakers in order to promote and distribute their work.

Copyright laws were one invention that accompanied the replication that the printing press and printmaking introduced. Before reproducibility could be taken for granted, only the wealthy could afford to adorn their walls with the work of painters; after it, peasants could have their own woodcuts of saints and angels.

This makes your association of copyright with elitism, o copyright-smashers – and your attempts to cast artistic ownership as stifling or destructive of creativity — alarmingly batty, to say the least.

ARTICLE19’s excellent prescriptions for bloggers’ rights — putting them on a par with those of professional journalists — were recently the subject of a post in this spot. This same organisation has also made thoughtful recommendations for the evolution of copyright laws in another paper. Perfectly in keeping with what copyright allowed Durer to do, this document says:

Freedom of expression and copyright are complementary inasmuch as the purpose of copyright is the promotion of literary, musical and artistic creativity, the enrichment of cultural heritage and the dissemination of knowledge and information goods to the general public.

Some of us can only pray that protecting copyright as its rules are revised for the digital age will free arts workers from paymasters. From the domain of musical composition, the psychologist Anthony Storr offers in The Dynamics of Creation (1972) an elegant example of what financial dependence costs creativity:

Some very good music has been written for film … but the limitations imposed by having to tie the music strictly to the action means that the composer cannot choose for himself a vital dimension of the composition, its length. Most composers, therefore, rate film music as ‘incidental’ music, and separate it sharply from original compositions which truly reflect their own creative personality.

… In the last few days, we have learnt from Salman Rushdie’s riveting autobiography, Joseph Anton, about ARTICLE19’s crucial support in his years of enforced hiding from assassins trying to carry out his death sentence, the Iranian fatwa. Curiosity about this organisation’s backers led us to discover that these include Britain’s Foreign Office, the Department for International Aid (DFID) / UKAID, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Commission, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Open Society Institute (OSI), the Ford Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and in Silicon Valley, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

That was a real comfort – knowing of the existence of an organisation with international financing that advocates both blogging as a form of free speech and copyright protection.

Now about your Tupperware march …

… over to you,

post-Gutenberg

Might audience jealousy of artists explain why copyright is being officially destroyed on the internet?

. Micropayments, Social media and networking, The future of publishing . , , , , , , , ,

Do artists deserve to eat?
Photograph by Mark Barron

In a March post, post-Gutenberg asked,

As more writers and artists without formal qualifications but with undeniable gifts find audiences for their work on the net, will micropayments finally take off?

[…]

So far, so-called Millennials – the generation in their twenties and early thirties now shaping our experience of the net — have shown little enthusiasm for […] experimenting with micropayments — direct transactions between buyers and sellers […]

Many ardent campaigners for the so-called ‘Freemium’ economy willingly pay small ransoms for the latest gadgets – even when these are only minor improvements or enhancements of last year’s versions, and are designed to fatten the profits of the hated capitalists. Few of them learn to cook simple meals from scratch: they are happy to pay huge mark-ups for bland microwaveable fare cooked and packaged by giant corporations, or to patronise fast-food chains.

Why is it seemingly only art that turns them into Scrooges?

For people working in the arts, the grim news last week – ‘European Parliament Kills Controversial ACTA’ — marked surging public support for depriving them of any protection from online piracy:

The European Parliament rejected the controversial global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in a crucial vote on Wednesday. […] ACTA, abbreviation for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, mandated that signatory countries implement legislation to criminalize certain types of downloading content such as music and movies, from sites not sanctioned by rights owners …

ACTA was killed by a vast online social network expressly formed to oppose paying creative artists for downloading copies of their work. There were some eye-popping attempts at justifying this European vote in the comments section of a furious protest against ACTA’s defeat by the Scottish novelist Ewan Morrison: ‘Throwing out Acta will not bring a free internet, but cultural disaster’.

To study that thread is to pick up a persistent undercurrent of jealous resentment – whose real target is not, as so many of those commenters claimed sanctimoniously, the ‘content conglomerates’ or multinational music publishers and film studios charging inflated prices for CDs and DVDs. It is the musicians, actors, and other ‘content-producers’.

One commenter seemed to speak for many in this post:

Bauhaus

Culture is shared and owned by everyone.

Floggin plastic discs, is a business, and nothing to do with culture.

A flurry of comments belaboured the point that artists must simply accept that technological change has made it difficult or impossible to prevent people from helping themselves to art free of charge.

At post-Gutenberg, we wondered why these stalwart defenders of freeloading have yet to form a movement against paying farmers for food. As tillers of the soil use air, earth, and knowledge of crop-growing ‘owned by everyone’, why not risk arrest and imprisonment by ganging up to pirate vegetables, eggs, milk and poultry from fields and farms unprotected by fences or other low- or high-tech barriers?

As heatedly as they insisted on freedom for themselves, the commenters crowing about ACTA’s defeat demanded that artists – especially musicians – work on their terms. These go beyond requiring musicians to ‘share’ recordings of their work for nothing. Never mind if they are brilliant composers with crippling stage-fright, or who would simply prefer not to perform live, these audience members know what is best for them … and some wrote strings of posts making essentially the same demands:

bleeper

The world has changed, and it has been changing for well over a decade now. A generation have grown up expecting free music and it’s nothing to do with being ‘radical’ or ‘hip’, it’s just the norm.

I suggest becoming a renowned performer rather than relying on CD sales.

To put it bluntly : adapt or die.

whitesteps

This little rant is of course based on the assumption that the grotesque wealth that has, in recent history, accompanied success in music or acting or writing is in any way desirable. 

wh1952

Pirating is wrong, but […] maybe the artists need to perform more. Those “used to be musicians” might still be if they’d got out of the studio and into the pubs and clubs like their predecessors did.

dirkbruere 

So music will once again be about artists performing live, instead of corporate fatcats presiding over billion dollar industries.

What a tragedy. 

seeingclearly

Most of the people you are talking about and their businesses, those in the creative industries, willingly use and exploit the free internet to give a wider audience a taste of what they are about and to use its capacity as free advertising for their events. The bonus of this is that live events which had been dying have now been invigorated.

wh1952 

[…]

[Musical artists must] do what most musicians have always done, flip burgers during the week and live for the gigs on Friday and Saturday night.

alloomis

[…]

… [U]nregulated web will lead to musos having to play guitar solo on street corners for thrown coins. can’t see anything wrong there. 

Existangst 

[…]

If you create something outstanding and expect to live off the work for the rest of your life, and your family for 70 years after your death, then you must charge a sufficient amount to invest the proceeds and live off the investment income.

Otherwise you need to continually produce new works, or perform existing works.

We did not have more than a few minutes to test our impression of artist-envy in a search engine trawl. Two results – not enough to prove anything, but admirably frank, and revealing:

From a post titled ‘Why we are insanely jealous of artists’ on Jason Kallsen’s Vinethinking blog:

At a certain point, usually in our youth … we stand alone in front of the mirror with thumb raised and sing along to a song that is pounding out of the stereo.  And during our dream sequence, we see thousands of screaming fans before us, cheering us on.  Yes, deep down, at some point, we all want to be that person.

[…]

We love artists, and we are jealous of them for two reasons: they live their life doing what they want to do without permission or apology, and their career creates legacy projects naturally. [his bold type]

From Momus’s click opera blog:

I’m jealous of artists especially when a shiny new copy of ARTFORUM arrives. I flick through the pages looking at the ads.

It’s important to be jealous, without rejecting. Jealous and full of desire.

[…]

I’m jealous of the super-elite art tribe who ride the global flow from one biennial to the next.

And I’m ultimately jealous of the fact that our society has evolved to such a level that we indulge people as if they were children, and let them act out the whims and games of children in public, and pay them for it. It seems that being an artist — in the West, or in China — is the ultimate evolutionary point of the individual. Perhaps it’s a point we’ll recede from as times get tougher later this century, but a world without these selfish, clever, silly children isn’t a better one.

Jason Kallsen points the way to the right solution – which is most definitely not to deprive artists of copyright:

[W]e can all live fuller lives than we probably do.  Even if you are chained to a desk (for now) find an outlet that allows you to creatively do whatever the hell you want to do.  A painting class, doing more personal writing, visiting museums more often, taking the camera around town on a daily mission to make one great photo, etc.

It is only a small leap from there to the reason why this post-Gutenberg blog was started last September – to campaign for changing the ownership structure of media to let members of the audience become co-owners, and give them the chance to perform and publish themselves. See, for instance: ‘Co-owning media is on the horizon …‘.