[DMCA-Activists] Re: [DMCA_Discuss] Zittrain: Call Off the Copyright War

[Jean-Michel Smith]

On Wednesday 27 November 2002 07:57 am, Seth Johnson wrote:

> Nobody writes for free
>
> The logic of providing incentives for creative work through
> markets is intuitive and longstanding. As Samuel Johnson put
> it: ''No [one] but a blockhead ever wrote, except for
> money.''

Samuel Johnson is the blockhead.  Reducing art to an economic commodity is a 
disservice to artists, destructive to our cultural heritage, and should 
frankly be insulting to anyone with a creative bone in their body.

I write for free ( https://expressivefreedom.org/node.php?id=195 ), and a 
brief perusal of USENET and the web will find countless examples of other 
authors (some much more talented than myself) who also write for free.  
Indeed, the most popular and widely read electronic books are Free (while 
their commercial counterparts languish and go largely unused and unread).

Why do people write for free?  Because creativity is a pleasurable, enjoyable 
process, and sharing it with others (hearing their feedback, knowing that 
others enjoyed it) is a pleasurable process.

Money is ONE incentive to produce material (often, as we see in music and 
television, very mediocre material), but it is by no means the ONLY 
incentive, nor even the most important one.  This little, critical detail is 
one that is completely missed by the current regime of government 
entitlements granting monopolies on thought and expression, and by its 
proponents.

Indeed, the logic of providing incentives for creative work through markets is 
not intuitive, but a free market is not what a government entitlement 
monopoly represents or creates.  Creating "incentives" through government 
entitlements such as copyrights (and patents, though that addresses a 
different form of creativity) is both counterintuitive to economists, and 
demonstrably problematic in numerous ways (as evidenced by the dramatic 
decrease in published materials when copyrights were first created, as 
evidenced by the plethora of derivative material...fan fiction and the 
like... that is banned under the current system, as evidenced by the 
ineffecient markets they have created in which talented artists are locked 
out of markets by media cartels that enjoy powerful vertical monopolies over 
their products, as evidenced perhaps most stunningly by the byzantine 
copyright laws themselves, that bear a far greater resemblence to the planned 
economies of the former eastern block than anything remotely resembling a 
free market, and so on).

Elevating one incentive above all others (and very arguably one of the less 
important and less potent incentives for creating art to boot), and defining 
an entire regime of law that assumes that to be the only incentive, and 
worse, favors publishers, middlemen, and IP lawyers over the artists 
themselves, is only "intuitive" because it is the system we've had imposed 
upon us from birth and been told by every media outlet there is, multiple 
times every day, not to question.

There are other ways to provide artists with economic benefits for producing 
art that do not require the granting of government enforced monopolies, and 
while many such approaches may themselves be government entitlements of one 
sort or another (tax breaks, etc.) at least, unlike entitlement monopolies, 
they are neither antithetical to free markets, nor to the collaborative 
creative process that lies at the foundation of virtually every project.

Jean.