Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.”
The dispute comes down to different perceptions of “rights.” One side claims primacy of the right to share and participate in the creative process, rather than consume info and entertainment via the terms carefully chosen for them by the wisdom of corporate and governmental bureaucracies; the other side claims primacy of the right to own and control bits and pieces of information and experience. One side is composed of (or at least ideologically infected by) parasites maximizing their own ends thanks to the creativity and information provided by others; on the other side are people who are primarily motivated by creative, intellectual, and social development.
What the impatient hackers and remixers don’t appreciate is that not everybody can be as creative as they want to be: some people just want a 9-to-5 job, some people just want to be rich, some people just want the sense of status and control conferred by a job title. Organizations have evolved as comfortable nests for many of these people to sit on their eggs. A lot of these organizations are in industries affected by copyright — think of record labels, TV networks, publishers and newspapers — and they absolutely depend on all of the barriers and constraints provided by copyright law for their survival.
Of course it’s somewhat ironic that copyright laws originally protected writers and composers from exploitation by printers and distributors; now it’s the means of distribution that are being protected. Anyhow…
You only need to walk into your local cineplex, or turn on the radio or watch network television for an evening to recognize how much cultural value is being produced by large organizations and protected by rules and regulations. And look at the artists themselves: it’s hard to even argue about the system’s fairness when Ben Stiller and whatshisname from Harry Potter can each make over $40 million in one year.
These are the sorts of realities that copyright rules are meant to preserve. Especially in Canada. Our creative economy has become a safe and comfortable place for a lot of executives, administrators, lawyers, IT and HR staffers, various people who like clip-boards, PowerPoint, and a sense of orderliness, occupying offices owned by deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates that are apparently more innovative and aggressive than Canadian companies. It wouldn’t be very nice if that system changed and all of those people had to give up careers they so dearly and passionately love.
Now that writers, musicians, film-makers (and people inventing whole new categories by mashing-up different mediums) can easily produce and distribute their work independently — now that organizational structures are becoming increasingly outdated and redundant — if we want to conserve the non-creativity of our creative economy it’s imperative that the Canadian government empower organizations with the ability to maintain the artificial barriers and conditions of scarcity on which their existence depends.
/satire
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