It seemed to be so close to being added as an afterthought that I almost skipped over it, but in his Field Letter this month, Theatre Communication Group Executive Director Ben Cameron touches on the fact that people are staging readings of plays without negotiating royalties.
“Please understand that this represents a grave misunderstanding of legal obligations – any public reading of a play, whether admission is charged or not, requires negotiated rights and payments of royalties to writers.”
I worked for a play publisher once upon a time so I know the details of this requirement. Often I had to point out to people that it was their decision not to charge people and that had no bearing on the cost of producing the play. You paid the hardware store for wood and paint and the theatrical supply place for costumes and gels even though you aren’t charging admission. With a little creativity you can do the play without any of these things and yet the person you don’t want to pay is the person whose vision provided the outline for what to build, paint and light.
Intellectual property theft is really big in the news and I can’t help but wonder if in 20 years or less we will have an entirely different view of intellectual property rights. Despite all the high profile cases about music piracy, I don’t know if stricter laws and aggressive prosecution will ultimately prevail. I suspect this will become even truer as the media and formats in which property stored becomes less and less tangible.
Around the same time I read Cameron’s letter, I read an article about tulips on Slate. Before you ask what tulips have to do with IP rights, let me assure you, quite a lot in both a literal and allegorical way. The article mentioned a memoir by a professor at Wesleyan University who saw a student picking tulips from her flower garden. She chased after the student and challenged the act.
You don’t own them,” one student said to her, “they’re nature. God made them.”
“God made them?” said Rose. “You think God made them? Did God call White Flower Farm and order the bulbs? Did God put it on his credit card? Did God dig holes for the bulbs in the fall and mix bone meal in the dirt to feed them and cover them with mulch in the winter? If you think God did that, you’re an idiot!”
The student told Rose to “chill.” Then, she writes, they spent “several vivacious minutes, engaging in what the Wesleyan Bulletin calls education outside the classroom.”
(And just as an aside, if you read the article you will realize God never intended tulips to be in North America. The lengths to which the Dutch go to simulate the conditions of eastern Turkey’s mountains where the flower originates are astounding.)
If this is the attitude of some about tangible objects, just imagine how they might view material that exists digitally and is easily transferred to other people or copied. It is much more difficult to conceive of the effort that went into creating a book these days than it was when monks painstakenly copied tomes.
This is not to say that people have no concept of the value of labor invested to create digital media. There is a multi-user game called Medievia that has long been the target of derision by members of the online gaming community for using a widely available code base called DIKU to create their game and then removing the credits required by the license. Medievia made the claim that the game was completely re-written but an investigation showed the changes were superficial. The length of debate on the legality and enforceability of the DIKU license is quite amazing and mind boggling. But it goes to show that there is some healthy respect for the effort people put in to creating works.
It should be noted that the creators of DIKU didn’t make much, if any, money on their creation. People are allowed to use the software for free if they don’t charge for the product either. The esteem people have for the rights of intellectual property creators may be indirectly proportional to the amount of money they make off the product. If Microsoft had created DIKU, you probably wouldn’t hear a peep.
The whole subject of IP rights is so fraught with complex issues it is impossible to try to address in one night’s entry. My purpose in posting tonight is to posit this idea–If we assume that in future years protection of artistic expression as we know it today will be nonexistent in practice if not in fact, what can artists do to shape the new situation?
Since the creations of people who don’t profit from their work seems to enjoy some protection among online society, artists seem to already be in a position to take advantage of the new world order.
Though between an opportunity to reap millions off your creation and having people jump to your defense online, I figure artists will still dream of money.
In a world where the open source model is creating operating systems like Linux and reference “books” like Wikipedia and popular music is often comprised of borrowed bits of other people’s music, can an artist hope to be much more than first and most honored among many contributors?
I surely don’t know. If anyone comes across a person or group who seem to be providing a model for the future on how to assert your identity and retain credit for your labor without resorting to ultimately futile stopgap measures, I would love to hear about it.
