How Government & Greed Can Stifle Creativity On The Web

Let me be honest, I rarely get worked up over controversial issues.  I have always been able to rationalize conflicting sides of hot topics like abortion, the death penalty, and taxes.  After watching RiP: A Remix Manifesto, I was frustrated and confused as to why our government, one that boasts ideals such as “freedom”, would punish its citizens for taking old works of art, music, and entertainment and making them new again.  What’s the reasoning behind this punishment?  Greed.  The government cannot wipe out all file-sharing and remixing on the Internet, so they have to punish it.  I can understand protecting someone’s intellectual property to a certain point, but after that, all greedy reasoning becomes null and void.

Up until the Internet, the unspoken supposition was that “people couldn’t simply self-assemble” any given task either fell under jurisdiction of the state or of a competing market (Shirky, 2008).  The Internet completely flipped this assumption on its back.  The Internet was created for the sole purpose of sharing information, proving (at least for a short time) that people could self-assemble without the help or governance of markets or managers.   Not only were these people just assembling, but they were also exchanging information at a rate that was impossible via any other method.  Users were creating forums to exchange information and tips on their interests, building off of each other with their swapping of ideas.  All these forms suggest that “structured aggregation of individual interests and talents can create a kind of value that is hard to replicate with ordinary institutional forms, and impossible to create at such low cost” (Shirky 2008).   The ability to publish ideas and trade ideas slipped through the fingers of the elites and fell into the open palms of the public, or more specifically, anyone with a computer and Internet connection (Shirky, 2008). When businesses rushed in to capitalize on what had happened, there was something of a problem, in that the content aspect of the web, the cultural side, was functioning rather well without a business plan (Lainer, 2010).  Since businesses couldn’t eliminate all file sharing and information exchange over the Internet, the next best thing was to punish it, an example of “the past attempting to control the future” (Cross, 2008).

The government heavily relied on the idea of “intellectual property”, which has been present since the 19^th century (Cross, 2008).  Basically, if someone comes up with an idea, and copyrights it, you can’t use it without their permission, which usually includes a fee.  Unfortunately, Disney took it a step further by convincing the government to create the “Mickey Mouse” law, where a copyright lasts for the life of the creator, plus 70 years (Cross, 2008).  Since the creator is dead, they cannot profit from their ideas, thus it’s the license holders who are making money off an idea they didn’t even create.  This is wrong.  I watched a TED talks by Larry Lessig about how creativity is being strangled by the law, he states that recreating has become democratized, it’s the literacy for this generation (Lessig, 2007).

I believe the world would be a better place if copyright laws became less rigid.  If artists and creators agreed to embrace the idea of a creative common and chose that their work be made available freely, it could be offered freely for non-commercial use, but not for commercial use.  Cory Doctrow, a science fiction writer who embraces the Creative Common, states “making my books available for free increase the number of sales I get” (Doctrow).  Two actions a reader might take to create this better world would be, take something that you are good at, and publish it on the Internet for free.  The second thing you could do is take something someone else has put on the Internet and remix it to make it your own.  This would begin to create a public domain that creativity feeds off of.

Sources

Cross, D. (Producer), & Gaylor, B. (Director). (November 2008). RiP!: A Remix Manifesto [Motion Picture]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.

Lainer, J. (2010). You are not a Gadget (pp. 3-23). New York: Alfred Knopf.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organization (pp.47-80). New York: Penguin Group.

I couldn’t find how to cite case studies or TEDtalks videos so here are the links:

Doctrow, C. [Case Study] http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Case_Studies/Cory_Doctorow

Lessig, L. [TEDtalks] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q25-S7jzgs