My Intellectual Property Circle

Intellectual property has been on my mind lateyl, and I've always had mixed feelings about the whole concept, especially when it comes to art. It goes to the very core of our society, our attitudes about the individual versus the society and how we go about valuing art.

To my mind art is necessarily a social medium. Humans are social creatures and artists can only create out of their experience, the environment in which they live. And art only gains meaning when it's shared with other members of society. As such, it seems to me that a good society should both fund the arts and reap the benefits. I guess that makes me a socialist, but it seems like there are some things that shouldn't be driven by profit - emergency services, health care, and arts. Certain things exist for the good of everyone and should be paid for by everyone.

But then who becomes the judge for what gets funding? In a society the size of our own, every member can't vote on every project. The competitive economy of a capitalist system would seem to be better suited to making such judgments. This would seem to be especially true of the worlds of entertainment or design (which is pretty much our entire word actually, but that's an entirely different post). Fans vote with their dollar and fund the entertainment or designs they prefer.

But even a punk rock band in somebody's basement is operating within a social framework. And it's probably just my own proclivities, but despite the seemingly unfeasible nature of developing a fair system for funding the arts, I just can't shake the feeling that for the arts, the social aspect is just so central that a profit based model destroys the authenticity of the work. Art needs an audience to exist; it can't be the sole property of the artist.

But of course, the social system we've developed, the American way now exported to most corners of the globe, is in fact Capitalism. Economics is the strand that ties us all together. Everything is ultimately boiled down to resources and profitability. That's our value system. So something as ephemeral as a pop song makes a millionaire, while someone who produces a tangible and useful object gets paid 10 bucks an hour, or someone who develops a new model of artistic development struggles in obscurity until years after their death. Does art in this system have intrinsic, or even social, value?

You see how this is a circle I can't escape. Art is by its nature social, but we risk boiling it down to the lowest common denominator. For an even longer, rambling view of my stream-of-consciousness reasoning read more...
Part of me understands that artists, writers and musicians need to be compensated for their work. The only way new art can come into being is if it's funded, if the artist can avoid starving long enough and get the materials needed to produce something. This is one argument against piracy and file sharing: whether it's books, music, movies or software, it's taking money away from those who create, and if it continues, they will no longer be able to develop new content.

Of course, it seems most people today see this as an empty threat, at least for the arts. The thought may be that artists and musicians create because they have to express themselves, and people expect that to continue whether the artists get paid or not. Or maybe, people just don't care as much about traditional media as they once did. Whatever the reason, music and arts are always among the first things cut in education, and the arts don't command much public funding and often struggle to secure private support so we know there's some sort of societal struggle with valuing art. In the case of music, specifically the popular end of things, sure the massive distribution infrastructures may crumble, some (or all) labels may collapse, and record execs may find themselves cut off from the cash cow, but we have the internet. Anyone can distribute, and presumably artists who are committed to their work will release work into the net regardless, and then maybe somehow people will pay for it. And of course, new filters will develop to help the rest of us find the good content, right? And we'll all pay a fair price, yes?

But we're operating in a hybrid world where the old guard is desperately holding onto what it knows and thinks it deserves, and the new method is still nascent, not fully developed. It's a state of flux, where the world is changing, and those filters haven't become functional. No one even knows what this new way of doing things might eventually look like. So yes, I get that there's fear and uncertainty, and people's livelihoods are at stake, but it's all based on this idea that people own that which they create.

Just for a second consider, what if they don't? What if the world, specifically human civilization, is a vast collaboration? Humans are social creatures, and an artist can only create out of the environment in which they exist. Even if that environment is the isolation of a hermit (whether imposed by the self or the group), the fact of the isolation is a key component to the creation. A reaction against a society is as much a part of society as the society itself. Anyone who sits down to write a song is going to be influenced by the music they've heard before, as well as the books they read, the art they see, and the people with which they interact. Who really deserves the credit?

And if you start crediting outside influences, where does it stop? Is an individual just a collection of experiences (or information) that was bound to produce something of a certain form? But we choose many of our experiences, right? I pick which books to read, what movies to watch, what songs to hear. Or do I? If I am just an assemblage of my experiences, and my early experiences were controlled by others - parents and then a state sponsored education system, not to mention the world of advertising that surrounds us and subconsciously infiltrates our minds, do I even have control over the choices I make now as an adult? How much individual agency and free will do I really have?

Or consider that we are truly individual beings. Do we each have only the limited perspective of a single body with perceptions and ideas that are unique? In that case would social interaction be an attempt to rectify the variations in our perception, a constant comparison between separate beings? And would our desire for this interaction be a result, not of our being various points within a single being, but rather of our extreme isolation as individuals? Do we share experiences for consolation, or as an attempt to build something larger from our individual pieces? Should each individual be rewarded for their contribution, and how is that value system developed? Or are all the parts necessary to the whole? What is an artist without an audience (besides hungry)?

From either perspective you end up at a place where art only exists within the context of a social system. I know, this is some fundamental shit, and I've moved way beyond just talking about the arts here, but I wonder if we, especially in America, suffer from mass scale individuality. Just think about advertising. There's this strange balance between appealing to people both on an individual level and a social level. We're encouraged to fit in and find our place in society by expressing our individual talents. Does that even make sense? Don't humans tend to isolate those that are different? The individuality we seek has to be of an acceptable social form. When it comes to producing something that is necessarily social, like art, is it really the work of the individual? Or is it the product of a system simply expressed through a single piece of that system? Could a genius just be the lucky conduit for humanity's shared progress?

What I'm getting at is that I'm not sure the idea of individual ownership of thoughts and ideas makes much sense when those thoughts and ideas only have a meaning in relation to the group. If you look at things that way, walling oneself off and claiming your ideas as possessions, seems like a pretty pointless excercise. Maybe the ideal is for everyone to be an artist in the sense that we are all collaborating to create a work we call society. What then is the value of individuality? A necessary variation in the parts of the system, a safeguard to keep the system dynamic?