On a panel discussion on copyright on Monday, I noted how in 1995 — when few folks had heard of the Internet and they probably thought it meant the walled garden of AOL — I had my own web site, where I posted for free and distributed to a fan list full text of a syndicated column I was writing at the time. There were newspapers paying me to run my column, and they understood they were “competing with free” because I was using the web for marketing, but they also knew under copyright law they had to pay me to run the column in their newspaper, and they were okay with that because running it added value to their customers, and with a syndication model each paper pays a much smaller amount than if it was a piece solely for them.

Without copyright law, once I posted it on the Internet for free, it would have been fair game for any publisher. How would I then have monetized my column, through T-shirts and paid speaking gigs?

My point was that copyright gives creators power to give away and sell, often simultaneously. I loved the fact that I could write one column and sell it to multiple people. Yet when I shared this anecdote a few years ago, a commenter said that a plumber doesn’t get paid more than once for installing a toilet, so a writer shouldn’t get paid more than once for writing something. The person went on to say it’s absurd songwriters continue to get royalties from CD sales and airplay of their songs; pay them when they write it and be done with it.

There is a lack of understanding of the creative process and the motivations of potential present and future payment that drives creators to create, and of the role copyright plays in that motivation. Most people are in fact paid directly for what they do at work (or in the case of someone who has been submitting a lot of comments lately from their employer’s computer — thank you, Whois — is getting paid not to work).

But this columnist in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper — my general read of choice when I lived in England — gets that this lack of understanding about creativity is truly troubling. In “Filesharers are Parasitic Freeloaders,” Anne Wollenberg makes this point. I hope the strong language in her headline doesn’t cause readers to miss important points she makes, such as this:

I have yet to read a sensible argument in favour of filesharing. If culture should only be created for the purposes of joy and enriching the masses, presumably none of us are allowed to have jobs in the arts. You must get a boring job. Any creating must be done out of love and if you starve, that will simply add authenticity.

Anyone who cares about copyright must be a cog in a gigantic money-grabbing corporation because there aren’t any writers, photographers or musicians out there desperately trying to stop people from pinching copies of their work. And anyone advocating the free dissemination of culture is only doing so out of concern for the greater good. Which is why presumably you’re all also ensuring unsold food from supermarkets goes to homeless people, and campaigning for the free dissemination of life-saving medicines, because if you care about people being given access to things they desperately need, obviously you’re going to start with the basics, such as food and heating. In fact, I’m impressed you’ve still got time to argue for free access to MP3s.

Now here she’s talking about infringing file-sharing, which study after study shows is the majority of such file transfers. She wonders: “I wish you filesharers would just admit the truth: you don’t want to pay. Instead, you bang on about how it’s fine to pass copies around because you haven’t removed the original, even though the basic tenets of copyright law are founded on the idea that infringement occurs if you copy the most important part of the work (copying all of it definitely qualifies).”

This repeated notion that it’s not theft if the original owner still has a copy is silly. Yes, the original still has a copy. But whatever your semantics, someone else has acquired it without a right to it under law, and that acquisition will hardly inspire more creations by the creator who has been deprived of her rights. We touched on this indirectly in our “Critiquing Copyright Canards” piece, but in retrospect it should have been a specific canard to rebut.

As to the charge that creative works are too expensive, she writes this:

So you think it costs too much to buy a film, or a song, or an album? Why don’t you film, or record, your own? You’re not going to die if you don’t see/hear/enjoy that one, you just want to. So create another. What’s that, I hear? You can’t actually make your own feature film, or record your own studio album, or write your own novel, because you don’t have the resources or the talent or the time or the knowledge or the ideas? Oh dear. Better steal someone else’s, then.

I’ve written before that when I think about how many times I listen to a song I like, 99 cents for that song has to be the best bargain on the planet given the time and enjoyment I derive over a lifetime. Of course, Ms. Wollenberg left out the silliest argument of all, spread across the Internet in chat rooms, that today movies and novels and music is a bunch of garbage, not worthy of payment.

Then why are you paying with your time in downloading and consuming it? You couldn’t pay me to watch something I felt was garbage.

But logic isn’t an infringer’s strong suit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 10:19 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, copyright law, copyright opponents, culture, economy, licensing, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.