Had an interesting confrontation with a resident in ID this evening about intellectual property which devolved into the usual dumb argument about stealing music is the same thing as robbing a house. Right, you keep believing that buddy. I could write 100,000 words on the subject but there were a few thoughts sticking in my mind that I wanted to expand on before they flutter away in my Bowmore drunkenness.
The IP rights crowd introduced the term 'stealing' to equate with 'copyright infringement' into the IP argument, so I have no qualms about using their terminology even though it's incorrect. I freely admit to stealing other people's work. It's part of my artistic process in music and graphic arts to use other people's work in my own. Since I do not profit from it I feel morally right in doing so. If I was doing it as a for-profit business I think I would make some kind of effort to share those profits in an equitable way with the original creators. But it's much more fun for me to do it without a profit motive and so that's how I approach it, making things and launching them out as messages in bottles waiting to land on someone's shore to be discovered.
I also create completely original works of art and music and writing and give them away on the internet via my own website and other websites for anyone to use how they see fit, and have done so for many years. I have a day job so I don't need to make a living with my art. The internet was originally created to share ideas freely, and I was on it before the IP crowd forced their way in and introduced such terms as 'digital rights management'. The day that Canter and Siegel spammed usenet with their Green Card offer was a sad day, indeed, and signaled the end of things as I and many others wanted them to be. Despite the fact that the internet has been hugely commercialized, I continue to create and disperse my work with no profit motive whatsoever.
Let's think about 'original work' a moment. I am a trained musician and artist and I am influenced by my environment, so is everything 'original' I create truly sprung originally from my mind or is it influenced by something I was exposed to during my life? I believe the latter is true. For example, my Symphony No. 5 is a direct response to hearing Radiohead's All I Need. I am merely regurgitating thoughts, musical phrases and images I have encountered over the past 46 years through the filter of my own neural network. The original artists long ago stole from nature, and today we continue to steal from nature and those artists' previous work. So I think whether I paint it from my own hand or sample it and reuse it is a minor detail in the larger picture of mass cultural heritage. The digital tools we have on hand at the moment simply make it easier to reference previous material already explored.
It's important to note that this post is a completely narcissistic and self-aborbed exercise, responding to an argument in real time by retreating to a blog and ranting. But oh well, what the heck, it's the Internet, you can do anything on it.
