I recently had an disagreement with a good friend who believed that everything should be free, in that, no matter who creates something, it should be free to the public to use as they will. I have heard that same argument from many people these days, read articles as well as people on this platform discussing the same. I thought would get down some of my own thoughts on the matter.
Not accusing all of doing this, but speaking from my own personal experience, those that say such things generally do not produce or create much of anything themselves and as such have no real grasp of how much effort and time it takes to create things which essentially have come from out of thin air using their intelligence, talent and skills (of which have usually taken a lifetime to develop). As an artist I have had my work plagiarized on three occasions and I admit it caused me deep personal upset each time. A cousin of mine is a psychiatrist and he once said: "Arthur, our feelings belong to us. No one can say to you that your feelings are any less valuable than theirs. Thus if someone accuses you of "over reacting"or being "too sensitive", then they are in effect trying to diminish your life experience. You can equally respond back "You are under reacting" or they are being "insensitive" . Thus if I "feel" I have been robbed by a person who has plagiarized my work, then it means there is something real there. It means I have been robbed.
It is surely instinctive to feel that if we have created something we then own it and is our right to either sell it or give it away. When I was at university we had lessons on copyright and one particular piece of advice stuck in my mind. - "If you give something away for free then you are saying it has no value". Examples given to explain this; - when a person hands you a leaflet advertising some bargain at a local store, 9 times out of 10 we just throw it away because if it was given free then it must be of no value. Another example, when you tell a joke to a friend and a week or so later he tells you the same joke back because he has forgotten it was you who told it. Again you gave it for free so it had no value so he did not need to remember the person who told it, he now owed it. If you had charged your friend a price for the joke, then I assure you that he would definitely have remembered it was you who told him. Another rather comical example but one that has a important message. The story of the the doctor who was pissed off at his friends always asking him for advice. If seems that a doctor was married to a rather sociable lady who liked to give dinner parties. The doctor dreaded these occasions because he knew that it was inevitable that one of the guests would ask his advice. In fact the last time a guest had asked hum to look at their knee after he had had a fall. This meant the guest had to drop his trousers. Anyway, at next dinner party he goes out into the garden to get some fresh air and sees that one of the guests is having a smoke. Now this guest just happened to be a lawyer and so during the conversation the doctor began to moan about this problem to him. The lawyer said" If you really want to stop this the answer is simple. The next time one of your guests asks you for help then you send them a bill then next day" . "I can´t do that" laughed the doctor. "Well that´s my advice take it or leave it but I assure you it will work". The doctor thought long and hard about this and decided that he would try it out. At the next dinner party one of the guests asked for his help with an eye infection and so the next day he sends him a bill. The guest phones him and complains saying "I thought we were friends?" "Yes of course we are friends but consulting me for professional advice has nothing to do with that" replied the doctor. The guest quickly phoned all his friends. At the next dinner party none of the guests asked the doctor for help. The doctor was very pleased with himself and phoned the lawyer to tell him that his advice had worked. "I see, good to hear, glad you took my advice". It goes without saying that next day the doctor received a bill from the lawyer.
We all know that the internet itself has not helped the matter. The fact that it is so easy to copy content on a website knowing that it is virtually impossible to trace the person who has done it. I also worked as part-time art teacher at one time in my career and in the early days it was so easy to steal software such as Photoshop, all you had to do was copy the program onto a disk and it was yours. As a teacher I was given a legal copy of Photoshop for personal use by the college I worked for. I did not appreciate the value at the time but I do now .Software companies are getting better these days with codes etc but it is still possible to get illegal copies if you really want to but you take a huge risk of getting a virus. Then there are the websites that stream the latest movies illegally such as Putlocker. It gets taken down every so often but then very quickly appears again. This kind of thing was probably started by the famous, or should I say infamous website Napster where you could get almost any song you wanted for free. The music industry said they were losing millions but no one cared because we all believed they were crooks anyway and so saw it was a victory for the guy in the street over the corporations. However, the guy in the street did not see the huge consequences this would have for the musician who would not also lose royalties.
This brings us to the other side of the coin. What price should our creations be? One argument I hear a lot is:- "If they did not charge so much then people would not steal them". It is indeed a powerful argument for the price of a music Cd, DVD Film or Cinema ticket is ridiculously high. And the price of software is shockingly expensive, especially when the software itself keeps on evolving and thus we have to constantly update. Industry often defends these high prices blaming the practice of copyright infringement as being the cause, but does anyone really believe that if stealing was eradicated from society that they would in fact lower prices? Not in today´s capitalistic materialistic driven world.
Probably the worst affected by abuse of copyright or plagiarism are the artists, the writers and the song writers and especially those who are unknown and have little money to sue their thief. This also comes back to what we perceive as value. In this world of celebrity and fame it appears we believe that if a person who is famous produces something then it is more valuable than someone who is not. Obviously this is linked to that fact that their product would sell more. It is a problem for sure and one I remember as a young art student back in 1990 being told that the biggest problem in the future in a free world would be copyright. How do we define and prove ownership of an idea? Well thanks to the genius invention of the blockchain perhaps this is all about to change. I know there are websites out there that you can literally have contet placed onto a specific blockchain which would in effect stamp date it the content forever (well as long as the internet does not fail). However for this to be legally binding the blockchain would have to be shown to be uneditable. With regards to Steemit I am uncertain about this, in that, I am not sure if it actually makes uneditable blocks of data after every month as does Bitcoin. For as long as you can edit content then it becomes questionable as to the date the content was made. I suppose one could do a screen capture as this would help or take a photo and send an email to yourself. But all this opens up clever lawyers to find loop holes and thus causes a drawn out legal battle causing big lawyer bills. Whereas I heard recently that uneditable blockchains will soon become unquestionable in the eyes of the law as were fingerprints when they were proven to be accurate solid evidence of identity.
To finish off, with regards to whether of not what we produce should be given away for free or at least freedom of use by anyone, I would say that to do that would be a very dangerous path to go down. For in such a world where everything was legally owned by everyone just as by the act of making something I suspect people would gradually just stop creating. I already know many artists who do not put their work online for fear of it being stolen or plagiarized. There is a wedding store in Oslo that now charges an entry fee because brides were first trying on designer dresses and then re-making the dress at home thus saving a fortune. I wonder how many writers out there who worry about sending their manuscripts to publishers for fearing their "great novel" might be stolen or plagiarized? For me it is not a question. If we made it then we own it. I am not particularly a religious person but even if the ten commandments were just a human invention the fact that one of those ten commandments is "thou shalt no steal" suggests that human beings agreed and generally accept that we all have the right to own something. But I would say it was a matter of respect and both ways. The owner should not be greedy on the price of a creation. Thus perhaps the old idea of bartering should return.
Image sources:
http://trinitynews.ie/plagiarism-module-introduced-for-all-students/
http://blog.foreigners.cz/social-dining-the-way-to-discover-the-world/ -social dinning
http://noticias.entravision.com/2016/06/16/vuelve-el-controversial-napster/
https://www.jacksonvillebarter.com/
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The best things in life are free, my friend. And I stole that though.
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Are you rich my friend?
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Yes I am. You know some people are so poor, the only thing they have is money.
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Yes very clever but trying saying that to people who are really dirt poor or come from a poor background or have never physically owned anything in their lives. Money is everything to them. I send money regularly to two separate African families in the Gambia and Sierra Leone whom I met whilst on vacation there. They use this money to send their children to school. IS end enough to pay for all their clothing, shoes books etc. Instead of giving to a charity were I do not know where the money is going or what it is used for, I decided I would try to make a difference to people I know and what their real circumstances are. This Christmas I sent them enough so they could buy a TV. The Gambian family said it was the fist thing they ever truly owned. Try telling them they should give this away for free and see what reaction you get. I was born in Sierra Leone and know the poverty that exists there and it is atrocious. Only those with money say the best things in life are free. And although this is true, we are as yet far from a Utopian society. When I create art I am lucky enough to have wealthy art collectors who buy my work and in turn I try to help to those less fortunate than myself. I hate money always have, but until the world does away with it, which will be never, then I try to make the best of a bad system that I did not create.
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Guess what I also work in the art scene, and I don't consider myself rich, but I have enough and I love my work. That's a chioce I made. I could have worked some boring job for more money, but I will feel miserable not doing what I love. I don't really feel threatened that someone can use my work, simply because in art everything is remix. Everyone copies from everybody and that's the way real creativity comes from. Copying is an inherent trait of people. Just look at kids, they copy everything they see from adults. Of course very little few are true geniuses and creators that change the course of their field like Da Vinci or Hendrix for example.
BTW in Indonesia, statistics say, people are happier than Western countries.
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Yeah I can´t really disagree with what you say here. Nothing is really original and it is indeed true that art evolves from past art with the odd genius here and there. And yes it is inherent in human beings to copy otherwise we would not have advanced or even evolved. But perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. What I am talking about is essentially being paid for the work I do and being valued for the effort I put in. I live in Norway and this is a big part of our culture. Everyone must be treated and paid as an equal valuable member no matter what job you do. This is why we do not have enormous wage difference in Norway. It is also one of the few countries that pays foreign workers the same wage as Norwegian workers. Low wages are forbidden and if you are caught doing it then the price is heavy. This is why foreign workers love working in Norway and often say the feel they are "valued". We see it as important to feel we have a value for the work we do. We express that value in what we own but at the same time we share what we have willingly with others. Perhaps Norway is unique in this I don´t know. With regards to stealing work, I spent 5 years of my life working on developing a style, a technique that was all of my own. I was inspired by Van Gogh and Rothko for sure, I admit that, but essentially tried to start from zero. Once I was happy with the technique I began creating works. The first two I hung in my own gallery and each took half a year to paint them as the technique is so meticulous. Anyway during the summer of that year (2008) I hung then in my galley, and one day a Russian art collector came in and wanted to buy them. He said he had never seen a style or a technique like it and was mesmerized. However I was not quite ready to part with them as I was intending on having an exhibition in Oslo. He was disappointed to say the least but warned me of the danger of other artists stealing my work as it was new. As if he was making a prediction a month later two guys came into the gallery and mistakenly thought I was a visitor. They began taking pictures of my paintings and it was clear that the camera they were using was not a typical tourist and they were taking close ups. I asked what they were doing and one replied "We are both artists from San Francisco and we have not seen this technique before and I ma not sure how the artist has done it. By taking close ups we can blow it up when we get back and dissect it." I was shocked that they were so open about what they were doing. I then told them that I was the artist and insisted the delete the pictures. Form my point of view, it meant that someone was taking five years of my life that I had put intense hard effort and dedication into just for someone to take in five seconds. This just can not be right.
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Mastering a craft takes way much more than five years, it takes a lifetime, and in most cases it's not enough. But let me put it like this. So some other "artist" come , take a closeup of your unique technique, which kinda sucks, I can relate to that. But no matter how much close ups of Mona Lisa you take you will never be the next Da Vinci. Your style is only your own. No matter how much you get copied, as every good artist with time the style evolves. So basically if you create original content you are always a couple of steps ahead.
It was a good conversation, thank you for sharing.
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