Actually, no. Don't ask me why I remember this, since I swear I stopped
consuming this stuff at 17, which was ...OH MY GOD! Almost 10 YEARS AGO!!
<Evan huddles in the foetal position for about 5 minutes, quivering silently>
Anyway, there's some kind of disclaimer in the Penthouse Letters section
saying that they obtain all IP rights to anything submitted, to re-use or
change as they wish (which may explain that infamous and
universal "Needless to say..." style).
> I don't have any idea how creative work will be funded in the
> future, but my best bet is it will NOT be funded AT ALL. The act
> of giving financial reward to creative endeavor depends upon the
> necessity of being able to control the work. I.e. if you can't
> know who actually created the work how would you award someone
> for the creation?
(Why would we have any sudden problem with verifying authorship?)
> I think the idea of people making money off their creative work
> is history. Kaput. Outta here. (Except for live performers.)
Actually, I predict that nothing much will change at all. First of all,
we're basically talking about writing, period. I'll still be willing to
drive 5 hours to see Cornell boxes in Chicago, no matter what the Internet
does. Any art based around "artifacts", and that includes painting, won't
be affected by the Net any more than it was affected by photocopying. The
fact that you can now get GIFs of Monet's "Waterlilies" from a thousand
locations -- and if GIFs are too low-quality for you, there are $23
high-quality poster versions available at every campus on the planet --
hasn't lessened the attendance at MOMA appreciably. (Aside: the most
reprehensible part of IP laws is this idea of being able to own
"electronic reproduction rights" to paintings whose creators have been
dead for centures.)
So back to writing. The supposedly new creator-verification problem
emerged a very long time ago, with the printing press. Once a document is
typeset, and no longer in someone's unique handwriting, how do you tell,
_simply by looking at the document_, who created it? The answer is that
of course you don't simply look at the typeset document. The situation
you're worrying about is, I think, analogous to me pulling _Angels &
Insects_ from the shelf in front of me and arguing that the publishers are
dupes or fools for continuing to send Byatt those royalty cheques, because
"for all we know" anyone could have written it, since it's just
a bunch of anonymous typing on paper.
But there is no such problem for 99.99% of the books on the market; we
all pretty much assume that the person who mailed the original manuscript
to the agent and/or publisher is in fact the author of the work. If this
is challenged, we have various fallback means of determining authorship
in court.
"Aha!" I hear you (or some people) saying: "On the Internet, There Will Be
No Centralized Publishers!" Bollocks. Of course there will be, for the
same reason we have paper publishers. Contrary to popular belief, it is
not prohibitively expensive for any random person to bind dead trees and
ship them out in boxes; it's not the cost of production that's keeping
everyone from being printed on paper. In fact, I'll bet it costs
significantly *less* to run a small publishing house than it does to run a
decent web site (and note that in the first case, there are at least
existing examples of people making money at it). Big publishers exist as
a quality-control mechanism (let's leave aside the tedious question of
whether the qualities being controlled for are good or bad), and
publishers get big by providing consistent and known levels of quality
(and reliable supply lines of 22 titles/month to major retailers, etc.)
And publishers, of course, can afford to *advertise*, and in the end
people pretty much read what's advertised, and that won't change just
because everyone and their dog can "self-publish" (like I said, this is
already the case, and it doesn't matter). And publishers can afford the
legal muscle to go after plaigarists. So the present symbiotic
consumer/publisher/author relationship will probably remain basically
unchanged.
And heck, if anything, technology will make it *easier* to verify original
authorship in very uncontentious ways: digital signatures, time-coded
server-logs, etc. Sure beats having to pore over handwriting samples or
brushstrokes, or doing chemical analysis on paper and paint.
So, onto the related problem of uncontrolled copying (without false claims
of authorship):
> The creative areas that are going to be hardest hit are writing,
> music, photography, video, graphic design--those easy to
> reproduce by computer.
Note that all these things are currently easy to reproduce _without_
computers.
> Images of things like painting, sculpture,
> crafts, theater, and dance are easily reproducible by computer,
And by television. So what? At worst, it'll all look like the
recorded-music industry: if you make your own copy, nobody cares, but if
you make a million copies and sell them, they arrest you. There's no
need to make things impossible to pirate; all you have to do is protect a
sufficiently large market in "official" paid-for copies that the creators
and their publishers can make decent money.
And the fact that there is a "software industry", and a hugely successful
one, demonstrates that even in cases where *exact* copies can be made
almost instantaneously (not true of most of the arts above), there are still
ways to make lots of money selling product.
> Happy Scenario (copyright 1996 by Greg Ritter): Technology
> liberates us to the extent that we all have a 24-hour work week
> and can spend all those extra hours doing creative work which is
> our life's passion.
We have the technology for that scenario already. Unfortunately, wages
are about half what they should be, and current pinhead economists say
that they have to decline forever (wage increases are now modelled as
"inflationary", which is like equating nutrition and obesity, a conclusion
not known for its healthful effects on teenage girls) so unfortunately it
seems that we'll have to go through some kind of economic collapse [or a
complete overhaul of the discipline of economics; guess which is more
likely] before we can even talk about this "liberating technology"
scenario. If technology gets any more "liberating", we'll have to go to
10- or 5-hour workweeks. But that's another issue.
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu