WASHINGTON — It’s World IP Day again, did you get all of your celebratory cards in the mail? No harm if you didn’t, but the ten-year-old designation by the World Intellectual Property Organization has been celebrated the last five years by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) with an event on Capitol Hill, and today was the latest and perhaps best yet. I’m posting two other blog entries from this event, one on the incentive to create and another on the challenges of artists and creators in developing countries. This one is on something every creator experiences with far too much regularity — a lack of respect for their craft in the digital age.

The always insightful Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, shook things up (as he always does) by arguing only 10% of us have talent. He gave himself a bit of distance by saying he was quoting Barry Diller, but as someone who works every day with creators across the U.S., I think there’s something to that statistic. Creators, true creators, are different, and we should be forever grateful for that.

Mr. Keen points out that the Free Culture crowd feels digital technology allows all of us to be creators through the use of others’ creative works, and somehow that creativity trumps the production of the original works. But at the end of the day, he said, we need to be responsible adults, and “responsibility is about behaving like a human being.” In other words, acknowledging others for the worth they bring to society and culture, and allowing them to use the means the law gives them to manage how they give to society and culture.

“I give to the culture,” said author Andrew Klavan on the panel I moderated, “but I want to get paid for it.” An international bestseller of crime novels (True Crime, Don’t Say a Word) and screenplays (A Shock to the System, One Missed Call), Mr. Klavan is an aggressive promoter of digital technology as a way for him to bypass the “gatekeepers” in traditional media and reach an audience directly. But fundamental to his ability to do that and feed his family, he notes, is to have his rights respected.

Another artist, a member of the Copyright Alliance grassroots network, articulated that point well. Sam D’Amico is a longtime professional photographer (please view his site) who has embraced the Internet as a way to market online his library of works, which fortunately he has licensed over the years rather than assigning away his copyright. He is also a professional educator who teaches the importance of rights for photographers. On keeping his copyrights and licensing those works now, at all sorts of price points based on use, he said that without his copyrights “I would — excuse my language — be screwed.”

Mr. D’Amico said that based on the students he has seen enrolling at the Washington School of Photography in Bethesda, MD, where he teaches, the displacement of U.S. workers in our down economy has led some to pursue their dream of being a professional photographer. He tries to get them to understand that following that dream means they’re engaging in a business, and copyright is a core element of that business.

Yet Mr. D’Amico, like every professional photographer I have ever met (and this job has allowed me to have discussions with hundreds of them over the last three years), finds that there is an attitude online that if an image appears before you, you have a right to copy and reuse that image, without permission of or compensation to the creator. Mr. D’Amico tags all of his works online with metadata making it easy to find him, and he is eager to work out a reasonable price for any use, including just a few dollars if you want to use one of his photographs on, say, a blog that is not part of a large commercial venture.

We often hear that infringement would decline if copyright owners made it easier to legally access their works. Mr. D’Amico couldn’t be making it any easier, yet widespread infringement of visual works continues.

Jennifer Garcia also gets this. The president of Logicreative Design, and another member of the Copyright Alliance grassroots network, Ms. Garcia makes it easy on her clients by providing, upon completion and payment, the rights to her graphic designs (such as corporate logos); in other words, work-for-hire. But she knows firsthand that graphic design often involves licensed works, such as photographs and illustrations, and people often erroneously believe that once they have paid for something, it is automatically theirs to do whatever they wish with it.

All creators should be grateful for individuals like Ms. Garcia, who are helping to educate the market about creative rights, including rights of others. But as she sees firsthand, there is this meme that if I have “paid” for something, I can do what I wish with it. This meme was faulted with great clarity by the U.S. Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters; I summarized her take in a previous post.

Mr. Keen made it clear that respect for creators, the creative process, and creators’ rights (copyright) is separate from one’s respect for the output of their creation. Big media, while extremely successful in producing a wide array of creative works, can produce some real stinkers. Mr. Klavan echoed that, decrying the recent trend in Hollywood of sequels, remakes of existing movies, and franchises based on longstanding fictional characters such as cartoon superheroes. So bash all you want someone’s novel, a studio’s motion picture, a band’s album, or a videogame maker’s latest release. Use your power as a player in the free market by not purchasing that work.

But don’t disrespect that creator’s rights, and most certainly don’t disrespect the rights of creators whose creations you admire and appreciate, by appropriating their creativity without their permission or payment.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 3:06 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under US Copyright Office, World IP Day, creativity, creators, culture, education, licensing, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.