Free Culture vs Copyright law

We’re often asked why we don’t believe in copyrighting the photography we shoot for our clients,  so I thought I’d sit down and explain, but first, watch this flash movie, it pretty much sums up my feelings perfectly:

No really, watch it, I’ll wait.

You done? Okay, now let me explain it from my perspective…

Creators’ rights… what does that mean? I think it means you should be properly compensated for creative WORK done, and it should end there. Once you’ve been properly compensated, your work should automatically become a part of society and society as a whole should have the right to enjoy, rework, extend upon or just ignore it. To that end, I think copyrights should last 2-4 years max and patents 1-2 years. Once something you’ve created has become a greater part of culture, it’s your responsibility to society to let it go and move on to create something new…. yeah that’s right, get off your butt and create something new, rather than rest on your laurels, aka residuals.  And if you can’t make money from your creation in that amount of time, either society isn’t interested in your creation, or you didn’t do a good job of letting society know about it.  Either way it’s time to move on and try again or do something else to earn money, and contribute to the greater good.

I can’t think of a more powerful disincentive to work and continue being creative than being paid for work you did years and years or decades ago. I certainly don’t get paid for the outdoor oil refinery tanks I painted years ago when I was a teenager. I worked, I got paid, and I worked some more, that’s the way it works in EVERY other industry on earth. Why should the “intellectual property” industry be any different? For all we know the guy who spent 10 minutes “writing” the song “Happy Birthday” my have gone on to write some amazing music, but instead he basically lived off his “creative work” for the rest of his life. He didn’t have to work another day in his life.

Actually the song “Happy Birthday” is an excellent example of several fundamental wrongs in the concept of strong, long copyright control. Ever wonder why all those restaurant employees sing crappy lame birthday songs? It’s because the song “Happy Birthday” is still copyrighted and if you want to perform that song publicly or put it in a movie or TV show, you have to pay a lot of money. In fact technically under today’s strong copyright laws, you aren’t even legally allowed to sing it at a private party without paying the appropriate royalties.

I’m sorry but all anybody wants to hear is the traditional “Happy Birthday” song. Frankly, I can’t think of a song more deserving of being in the public domain than “Happy Birthday”. But the story doesn’t end there, the ultimate irony follows — he didn’t even write the song, he borrowed a 50 year old tune called “Good Morning to All” and changed the words. In other words, he built upon somebody else’s creative work. Explain to me again why he got a free ticket through life because he borrowed a tune and changed some words.

And don’t even get me started on how Disney built its entire kingdom by building upon the intellectual property of others like the Brothers Grimm. (I don’t have a problem with this, so long as they don’t have a problem with others doing the same to them, which of course they do.)

Another example are those 3 or 4 notes you hear on Seinfeld between each segment. The guy who “wrote” that “song” makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in residuals, please explain why he lives the good life for a few hours (or more likely minutes) of work, and the rest of us work 40+ hour weeks just to get by.  Don’t get me wrong, I believe in capitalism, and if society values those four notes that much, then great, but I don’t think that’s the case. I just think the power of the intellectual property industry has become so unbalanced that they’ve created what is probably the most massive example an industrial hand-out. And they’ve very calculatedly turned public opinion towards the belief that there’s nothing wrong with this idea, and sadly the general public has sheepishly followed along.

On to the issue of an industry that was destroyed before it ever even began. Imagine the amazing applications and uses that could be invented if people were allowed to create real businesses and invest real capital into creating technologies that allowed you to build upon and enhance other’s creative works… I’ve had dozens of ideas of really cool tools I’d love to build that would do just these kinds of things. But there’s no way I’m going to find an investor that would support me, even if what I created was technically legal, they simply won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole.

It’s interesting how terrified the intellectual property industry is of piracy. But the solution to fight piracy is simple:

1. Make it available
2. Make it affordable
3. Value add

If people can’t get legal access to something they want, they’ll pirate it, if they can’t afford it, they’ll pirate it, if buying it legally doesn’t give them any added value, they’ll be more apt to pirate it.

The DVD industry is an excellent example of how well this works, prior to DVD, movies and TV shows were often very hard to buy legally, the studios priced VHS and Laserdiscs often close to, or over $100, or didn’t make them available at all, and when they did they rarely included any value added extras. The result, folks recorded off TV and made copies for friends. Then came DVD, and somebody in the movie industry (somebody at Warner Brothers, if I’m not mistaken) realized they could make money on volume, so DVDs of nearly every movie and TV show ever made were released for sale at a reasonable rate often less than $20.  The discs were conveniently packaged, high quality and stuffed with special features and extras. Lo and behold, what happened? People stopped recording to VHS and bought DVDs in droves, to the point where movie studios now make more money on DVD than they do in theatrical runs.

iTunes and hulu are a similar examples that followed a similar trend.

On the other hand, let me give you an example of what happens when you overly restrict your works and over protect your copyrights… you get forgotten. Perfect example, Harold Lloyd — in his time (1920s and 30s) Harold Lloyd was arguably one of the most famous silent film producers. He was loved by millions, his films consistently topped the box office, he has his hand prints (and glasses) in front of Hollywood’s chinese theater, yet nearly three generations of folks have never even heard of him. Why is that? Certainly his contemporaries “Charlie Chaplin” and “Buster Keaton” we’re not forgotten. Was it because his films were inferior? Not at all, it was because he controlled his creations so vigorously that they basically disappeared from popular culture. Society as a whole could have… no… should have been enlightened by his works, but instead at least three generations have completely missed out on his creations because of overprotective copyright control. I’m sure somebody made some extra money, but society is for the worst, and that’s just sad.

Obscurity and/or over protection will always hurt sales more than piracy ever could.

This is why everything I’ve ever created has been released directly into either the public domain or creative commons. Let me give you a personal example. Back in 2006, my friends and I spent one year and over $30,000 creating a documentary, Done the Impossible. We released the movie under creative commons and we even bittorrented our own movie and uploaded it to Google/YouTube.   Basically, we used the movie itself as a method of promoting the DVD which was high quality and jammed pack full of extras and special features.

The result? Our DVD has sold over 30,000 copies, with no distributor and no traditional marketing. In fact the day we released our movie on Bittorrent, our sales quadrupled.  To date we’ve profited by over a quarter of a million dollars, and made our budget many times over.  Not bad for a low budget documentary with no traditional marketing. We’re still receiving checks today for something that can be legally passed around for free.

Nuf said…

Jeremy Neish (Kelly’s Husband)