Re: copyright expiration as a spur to creativity

Mike Bradley <michael[_at_]vision-soft.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone have citations or examples of how being paid for one's work
> has spurred innovation and creativity?

Try reading the oral histories Backstory and Backstory 2, for a start, in which many of the screenwriters discuss their reasons for writing--they did it for the money. Talk to most creative professionals and you'll get a similar answer.

Contrary to romantic myth, starving in a garret is not an especially good stimulus of creativity. Nor is wasting one's energy scrambling for a living at a day-job, though I will grant you there have been and are some prodigiously creative people who are also productive at full-time jobs outside the scope of their artistic life. You can find an exception to any rule; that doesn't make the rule less applicable to everyone else! Generally, artists like to eat, and find that they do more and better work when freed from the necessity of spending time and effort doing something other than their art.

Since we are no longer under the patronage system which supported Michelangelo, Cellini, and Holbein, we prefer to follow Hogarth's example, and be paid as professionals, rather than proteges. Sometimes we keep the copyright and exploit it ourselves; sometimes we trade the copyright for the security of a paycheck or for a profit-sharing arrangement; the much-maligned (on this list) publishers and producers who receive the copyrights then have a financial incentive to keep paying us and to commission and develop other work, thus encouraging the creativity of still more artists and creative endeavor.

For the record, I would prefer to see more liberal interpretations of fair use for purely academic work and scientific research--I think the concept of fair use is a valuable one to our culture and society. I don't believe, however, that plagiarists should be compensated at the expense of original creators, which as I see it is precisely what the removal of copyright protection would promote. It was to correct that state of affairs that modern copyright law was invented in the first place.

Amy Stoller

ghoti
<redherring[_at_]tuna.net>
<:)))>><( Received on Thu Jul 09 1998 - 16:59:23 GMT