Happy, Happy, Joy, War

I don't pretend to have thought deeply about JoyWar - though I do, naturally, have my knee-jerk response to the facts as I understand them - but something Joy Garnett posted in a forum does resonate powerfully with my sense of what copyright means, in a world where distribution and copying are often the very same thing, where media is scrutable, infinitely manipulable, and user-friendly:

...once you put a work out there it becomes part of our common cultural experience, it belongs to some extent to all of us (otherwise why put it out there?); it is something that will be built upon regardless of the author’s wishes – it is something that we as artists have a responsibility to respond to and yes, create new contexts for.

(crediting Judge Kozinski, whoever he is, for the insight)

There seems to me something very true about that - something that corporate entertainment interests will have, inevitably, to face up to; because the truth is that they have already lost the control they claim as their legal and moral right. The RIAA's scattershot lawsuit/terror campaign looks to me like death throes, or an act of desperation - or, at best, a delaying tactic... though they don't seem to be making any progress toward solving their problem, so it's probably not a delaying tactic at all, is it?

I use the term "entertainment interests" because, once art becomes commercialized - as, for instance, by taking it out of your studio and trying to sell it - it becomes, de facto, entertainment. Once you pitch the project, offer the painting for sale, put the song on the radio, bring out the cake you decorated and start to hand out dessert forks - you've given up some control. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Maybe all of it. Clearly the RIAA and Apple and Metallica's drummer would like to keep all the control... but they can't. They've already given it up, because - you know what? - they put their wares up for sale.

And let me turn it around: entertainment is de facto art. It's entertainment because nobody needs it - or anyway, any particular piece of it; it's art because if it weren't art, it wouldn't be entertaining. But that means the purveyors of entertainment have to face up, not only to the nightmare media reality they've been instrumental in creating, where any kid with a computer can copy anything and give it to everybody... but also their responsibilities as artists (or artists' representatives), in a community of artists. Does Danger Mouse want to remix JayZ's Black Album with samples of Beatles songs? Well, what the hell: he's an artist, the Beatles were artists, there's a social contract of a sort in simply being an artist. As Super Chicken said, "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it." It turned out to be more dangerous than you knew? Too bad, so sad.

I'm not saying Danger Mouse gets to re-package Beatles songs and turn around and sell them. I'm saying, come on, there's a middle ground here, and pretending that there is no middle ground, or mining it and turning it into a DMZ... that's not okay. It's also not gonna work. And whoever's being the hardass, refusing to compromise, insisting on absurdly strong copyright protection, threatening groundless lawsuits against people who can't afford lawyers? That party is going to be the bad guy. ("A" bad guy. God knows, there's room for more than one bad guy.)

To paint the issue as one of "artist's rights" versus "pirates" is absurd and disingenuous, and by attempting to frame it in such clear-cut, binary terms, the entertainment interests haven't defined their opponents; instead, they've defined themselves. They have put themselves firmly in the wrong, by refusing to accept their own responsibility as sellers. Let the buyer beware? The buyers respond, caveat vendor. And for the first time - look around you - the buyers have more power than the sellers. Lots more power.

If only we could get a handle on this global warming thing, the future would be looking very interesting.