My Political Education: Lesson 1, Part 3

By mandrill | Published October 27, 2006

If you haven’t been following this Part 1 and Part 2 are worth reading otherwise you won’t have any idea what we’re on about.

I contend that art (in terms of IP) should have the shortest protection possible (the lifetime of the artist), Midwesterner disagrees.
Here is my reasoning:
For the purposes of brevity art is defined as the following: music, video (including film), literature, fine art (painting, sculpture etc.). And is considered to be independent of the medium of transmission, you could be reading this on a peice of paper and it would be the same as reading it on a screen.

  1. Art is the product of a person’s mind, and hence is their property. This is a given. However it is different from other forms of IP for the reasons stated below.
  2. Art’s value is completely subjective (I can’t see whats so special about the Mona Lisa for instance, and yes I have seen the real thing. I certainly wouldn’t pay to have it hanging on my wall.)
  3. Art is ultimately useless and impractical and hence it is objectively valueless
  4. Art is rarely created for profit (you can usually tell if it is because its generally inferior. Hence the Spice Girls.) Artists never become artists to get rich. (You just have to look at my poetry, I didn’t write it to make money, I wrote it because it needed to be written.)
  5. Art would generally be created whether there was an incentive to do it or not.
  6. Since the means of production/distribution is now extremely cheap and accessible to (nearly) everyone, and will only become more so. The artist no longer needs to employ the services of a third party (studio, publisher, record company) in order to profit from their art should they wish to do so. They may no longer be coerced into giving up the rights to their property in order to get it distributed (which is how it has been done in the past). Prints and castings of fine art may even be sold over the internet
  7. In the case of other forms of property, and other forms of IP, I can see the point in passing the rights to profit from it along to your descendants. The point may be moot anyway as any IP which is not art is generally not owned by individuals but by corporate entities (gone are the days of the gentleman inventor) and individuals do not often have the resources to exploit their IP effectively and so trade it to an entity which can. I can also see the merit in passing the physical part of fine art on as it is usually unique and is well known for holding its value (if it was deemed to have any in the first place). However giving someone the rights to profit without having worked for it (ie producing their own art) doesn’t sit right with me somehow, I may be flexible when it comes to family but letting a faceless corporation profit from an individual’s art long after they are no more is something I don’t think I can budge on.

I think that about covers it. I’ve said most of it before but its nice to have it all in one place. Do your worst :)

This entry was posted in Deep Thought, Lessons, Politics and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
  • mandrill
    Right, here goes:
    1) Copper is valuable because of what can be made out of it. There are various technological and scientific advances which would not have been possible if there was no copper. Also it is a finite resource it will run out one day, this obviously affects its value.
    Art, before anyone but the artist experiences it, is only valuable to the artist. When attempting to sell it the artist is reliant on there being someone out there who likes it and wants to buy it. That person may or may not exist. There will always be somone wanting copper, there may not always be someone wanting art.

    2) I maybe should have been more specific. Art is only ever useful to the artist (in terms of the price they can get for it, and how they feel whe they create it) and the eventual buyer (in terms of the way it makes them feel) It serves no practial objective purpose. Its usefulness is entirely dependent on who is experiencing it at the time. It produces nothing, and, as you point out, does nothing to serve the basic needs of a person. It does not hold its value from viewer to viewer.

    3)Ok I'll concede but with the following proviso; Art is rarely created primarily for profit, first and foremost art is created by an artist because that is what they need to do. To take the example of Mozart, He traded his skill as a composer and musician to a patron who paid him for his work, much like he would pay someone to build him a house or work in a field. Mozart's work was popular at the time mainly because of the influence of his patron. He was lucky, as are artists who get recording contracts/publishing deals/gallery shows/movie deals today. For every one famous artist there are thousands of unknowns, working away at their art on the side while they go out and work at other, more economically reliable, jobs. Which, wihtout a patron, is probably what Mozart would have done. This may not be a perfect example as Mozart was raised to be a musician, his family had all the right connections so as to make it easier for him to get patronage. Without a patron Mozart may well have been a composer but only in his spare time, as a result we may never have heard of him.
    The examples of Yoko Ono and Garth Brooks are misleading, Yoko Ono, may well be just as commercially minded as Garth Brooks, its just that her segment of the market is different. Both created the art first, before they realised they could make money at it. In both cases the art was creted before profit was a consideration, profitability is always a side effect, and is never guaranteed. Anyway this is beside the point, I'm not basing my argument on a persons motives for creating art. I'm just pointing out that the motives for doing so are not primarily profit. Without the need to create and the talent to do so, the art wouldn't be created in the first place, then it is never profitable. (Its a sad thing to have the need to create and no talent, see William McGonagall.)

    4) There are very few people, relative to the general population, who can make a living being an artist. Art is a luxury, both for the artist and the appreciator. Your not going to go out and see a movie if your basic needs are not already met. Similarily, creating art is a risky business, there is no way of guaranteeing that art will sell. It works the same way at a societal level, a society where basic needs are met (and exceeded) and where there is enough spare time (for the artists) and surplus money (for the buyers) will produce more art than a subsistence based society. We can see this in developed nations, Hollywood would not exist unless people had spare money to spend going to the movies and buying DVDs. Again I think this is beside the point, my point was that art needs no incentive other than the artists desire to create, and of course no more pressing matters to attend to. Not having enough to eat may be a disincentive to the production of art, but having these basic needs met is not necessarily an incentive

    5)Improvements in the distribution network remove the need for the middlemen (publishers) and their coercive practices. At the moment we practially have confiscation of property before death, as the publisher may retain the rights to the work and either pay a lump sum for them or a paltry royalty. Artists can now self publish and promote with greater ease, and with a greater share of the profits coming directly to them. Alot of the argument over current copyright laws is focused upon protecting the profits of the publishers rather than the rights of the artists as it is they who profit the most from them. I'm all for protecting an artists rights but publishers are no longer necessary and the quicker they realise this the better. Again this, on its own, is not an argument for the treatment of artistic IP I'm proposing however once publishers are taken out of the equation, there is only the artists rights to consider.

    7)You mistake my intention. The product of a person's art is not the same thing as the art or the right to profit from the art. I make millions with a book I write (I know, but bear with me), those millions are not the book, nor are they the right to profit from its publication. I'm perfectly entitled to leave those millions to my descendants. I'm not denying the creators of the art the right to anything, but why, after I've left my millions to my son, should he then be able to keep producing more profit from my mental and physical labour without doing anything of his own? Hopefully he'll see how successful I was at my art and be inspired to create his own. Also remember that the art is independant of the means of transmission. I could leave my son the original handwritten manuscript of my bestselling novel and if he wishes he may sell it, he is only selling the medium of transmission, not the sole rights to profits generated by reproducing my book my book after I die. I'm not advocating an embargo on producing reproductions, I'm talking about making it allowable for anyone to produce reproductions. Once I die my book enters the public domain, people can do whatever they like with it, no restrictions. If my son wants to try and turn a profit from it he can but he'll have competition, it will therefore be less profitable for him to do it and again will hopefully encourage him to go out and do his own thing. Property resulting from artistic labour is the same as property resulting form any other kind of labour, ie fully tradable and transferable.

    I'm sorry if this has been a little rambling, it took me a whole day, with interruptions. I'm familiar with the C.S. Lewis quote though don't quite understand its relevance. The way I see it my proposal would mean even less state interference. Less work for the lawyers arguing over copyrights (see I knew I'd even that up somwhere) or who has the rights upon the artists death. Less hassle all round, more incentive for an artists descendants to go out and do their own thing instead of living in their parents shadow, more great music, literature, and movies freely available to all. Why should access to all these wonderful things be restricted to those who can afford it?

    I'm not sure where ethics comes into it either. I'll read up on it some more and see if I can figure it out, I've been meaning to dive into ethics for a while.
    Don't worry about being hit and miss in replying (I'll keep things in this thread, save any confusion) It works well for me too, I'm coming to the realisation that being a house husband is a little like spinning plates. Hope to hear from you soon.
  • Midwesterner
    re point 2, art's value is no more subjective than any other. What is the 'true' value of copper? Or of a piece of real estate? Any value is subject to what a buyer will pay.

    re point 3, to declare art is useless and impractical is to declare the things it does to be useless and impractical. It's a small step from there to declaring most pharmaceuticals to be useless and impractical. Means testing inventions for usefullness is a guarantee of more government bodies deciding what we should do with ourselves.

    re point 4 "Art is rarely created for profit (you can usually tell if it is because its generally inferior." So if I understand this point, Yoko Ono is a talented artist since she is non-commercial, and Garth Brooks 'inferior' because he is energetically commercial? For that matter, wasn't Mozart completely commercial? Don't all artists who do not have independant means of support, work for profit?

    And besides, why does it matter why someone creates something? What business of anybody's is it why I do anything?

    You are making a mistake by conditioning legal structures and actions on perceived motives. Doing this means that motives must be determined by a mind reading government before it decides how it will treat someone.

    I recommend you look a little into ethics, particularly virtue ethics, which I think is a very flawed position. My own position is rule consequentialist.

    I would like to insert here a quote from C S Lewis -

    "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

    re point 5 "Art would generally be created whether there was an incentive to do it or not."

    Not even close. Hungry, cold and naked people generally try to solve their immediate needs before attempting 'art'. The amount and quality of art produced in any culture is directly proportional to the freedom from physical want and interference that a society maintains. Where art pays well, there is inevitably more and better of it.

    re point 6 I am confused about how improvements in the distribution marketplace can be turned into grounds for confiscation of property at death. What this sounds like is an argument for 100% death tax on artistic endeavors because the distribution system is more efficient. You'll have to explain your reasoning on this before I can understand and debate your point.

    re point 7 My grandparents worked their entire adult lives to buy a farm that they passed on to their children so that they could continue to benefit from the work their parents invested in buying and building it. Why, if my grandparents had spent there effort creating novels or paintings or music, should their children have been selectively denied the right to inherit what is undeniably their parent's property. By making the case that the property (art) belongs to the creator, but may not be sold or passed on as land or other property, you would deny the creators of the property the right to own the product of their mental and physical labor. I have a relative with a profoundly brain damaged child. She spent most of her life after his illness saving up for his care after she dies. You are, in actual fact, telling her she may not be an artist because the property resulting from artistic labor is singled out to be uninheritable.

    I'm going to continue to be very hit and miss unpredictable with my time for these interesting debates. That's the nice thing about this type of blog. If a thread goes slow for a month or so, it can still pick up where it left off. If you don't mind it, it works well for me.
  • Midwesterner
    Oops. I've been watching the other page for a reply. I didn't think to come and look on the front page.

    It's going to take me some time to catch up as I have a great many irons in the fire right now.

    I'll try to reply within a few days.

    My apologies. Thank you for putting this up.
blog comments powered by Disqus