Addison Road

I’m going to just throw this out there, and call it true. Communities that produce more creative works are better than communities that produce fewer. Ten researches discovering new treatments for disease are better than one. Ten musicians creating innovative new works are better than one. Ten computer programmers creating new widgets for my beautiful, beautiful mac are better than one, unless that one is Mike Kelley, who obviously could rock them all in a massive coding caged death-match.

Every interesting conversation takes place in the boundaries, in those areas where two strong principles crash into each other, and each recommends a different course of action in the same moment. The current state of intellectual property in our culture has all of the makings of just this sort of interesting conversation. If we buy that statement above, there are two following statements that seem equally as strong, but taken together recommend different courses of action in the same moment.

First Principle: Communities that compensate creativity allow more people to spend more time at creative work. At this point, someone will need to stand on the obligatory soapbox and cry out, “Artists don’t create for the money!” Of course they do. It may not be the sole motivation, but it is certainly a necessary component of the creative life. Without the Betty Friedman exhibition, and the money that it brought in, Jackson Pollack would have stayed holed up in a tiny barn on Long Island, and we would likely never benefit from the works he created in the ensuing years, freed of financial burdens. Not only that, but put aside the esoteric and very romantic vision of the tortured artist, struggling alone with her craft, unconcerned with the response from anyone outside. Think about creativity in broader terms: the medical researcher who develops a better malaria medication, the architect who is designing a city library. These people are also creating new works, and they are certainly more likely to do it if we compensate them fairly for it. In our culture, there exist two primary means for this compensation: grant money given to support innovation in specific areas, and an economic model that treats creative work as property, thereby allowing it to compete in the marketplace. Everyone wishes there were more money available from grants, but we have enough working creators on this blog to recognize that the money from the marketplace is the primary fuel of our creative culture.

Second Principle: Communities that promote a broad and free distribution and re-use of creative works create an environment conducive to creating new works. In 1997, I wrote a full concert of original music as part of my music theory degree. Most of it was for a 17 piece Big Band, a setting I had not worked in before, and a style that I was not completely familiar with. I spent 9 months copying CDs from friends, checking out scores from our music library, photocopying big band charts from our school jazz band, and immersing myself in the creative works of others. Keep in mind that much of what I was doing was illegal under our current copyright law, but keep in mind also that the financial burden of buying 50 CDs, and leasing original scores would have been obscenely prohibitive for me. By appropriating the free distribution and re-use of other people’s creative works, I built an environment for myself conducive to creating new works.

This is evident in the open-source software culture as well. There are freely available pieces of code called plug-ins for Word Press that do fantastically creative things, and they came about because the authors borrowed code from other plug-ins, merged them together with other open-source PHP snippets, and created something new, a derivative work. If every developer locked down their own code, and refused to allow it to be distributed and re-used, nothing even approaching this sort of robust culture of innovation would exist. We could say the same about shared scientific research, indie record labels, graduate programs with collective learning; those pockets within our culture that promote the free exchange of ideas tend to engender new innovation.

By now, the tension is obvious. A society that protects creativity as property engenders more creativity. A society that promotes the free exchange of creativity engenders more creativity.

The rub is this - there is an obscene amount of money hanging in the balance of this question. Companies like Microsoft are built entirely upon the basis of intellectual property. The entertainment industry here in LA runs on the fuel of intellectual property, as does that hotbed of publishing, Ventura. And because there is such an obscene amount of money involved, the legal system too is deeply involved. Companies like Disney have the kind of financial and political resources to extend copyright control over their property indefinitely, ensuring that the first principle (compensation for creation) has a much more prominent place in the law that the second principle (read Lawrence Lessig’s excellent book Free Culture for a full exposition of this). Artists who want to create derivative works, new works that make use of old material, or people who wish to immerse themselves in an environment rich with the innovative ideas of others have to do so by forcing themselves through an absurdly ambiguous crack in the copyright law, the fair use clause.

The result is a system that is breaking down. In the face of onerous restrictions, new innovators are either ignoring the property rights of others, as both hip hop and the white-label remixes did in the early 1980s, or submitting their works to the editing of lawyers, editing done wholly on the basis of copyright clearance, and not on the basis of artistic insight.

So what’s the way forward? In my next post, I’ll suggest several areas where I see middle ground emerging.