Killing Me Softly

I’m an advocate of free culture.

You can call me a tree-hugging liberal crack addict, but I believe there are things more important than ownership, especially ownership of the ideas, images and memes that strengthen and define a culture. I believe that limiting the use of cultural memes and their derivatives to the discretion of their original creators damages culture—it binds our creative hands and asks us to sit in the corner and wait until we have something unique to say, even though we’re all unabashedly aware that there ain’t nothing new under the sun. We’re told we can’t take the chorus from our favorite song and quote it in a book we’re writing unless we secure permission from the author first. (If you didn’t know, quoting fro poetry and song lyrics is not the same as quoting from larger works. You don’t get a free pass for small bits and pieces.) We’re told we’re not allowed to take imagery that has shaped who we are as people and that we have been surrounded by and inundated with and change it into something of our own devising—even derivative works are protected under copyright. And don’t get me started on digital copyrighted music, which quite honestly I can’t even wrap my head around—I understand copyrighting words and images, but performances? It’s mind boggling.

And potentially very harmful to culture.

And yet, I’m disturbed to read about The Orphan Works Bill, which ostensibly seeks to ameliorate the growing copyright problem by granting permissions—even commercial permissions!—to an infringer to use the work in question as long as he has “with reasonable diligence” tried to contact the copyright holder and failed.

Wait, what??

A long time ago when the internet was but a budding thing, I had a website I was very proud of (though would be terribly embarrassed by today, for both content and graphical reasons) which contained a number of my original essays. Over the years, those essays were pilfered from my site, and displayed on sites elsewhere with my copyright information removed. Other people stole the essays from those sites, etc, and over time, the essays became so far removed from my control that a person might stumble upon my work and have no idea that I penned it. (It wasn’t unusual for me to take my essays off my website after a time, so an internet search very well might not produce any results with my name attached to it.)

The fact that my work had been abused in this way doesn’t mean that it had been orphaned—it was merely estranged from its author through no fault of her own. In a way, content is an organism unto itself—it interacts with the individuals it comes into contact with, and they take it into themselves and have the desire to do something with it. They have been touched and affected by it. Wonderful! That’s the very point of writing, of painting, of gorgeous architecture.

But it’s a very different thing to take something as a whole and strip it of its author and its heritage—which is an important problem, but perhaps the point of another post—and place it in a new context without permission. I believe in a complete reconsideration of how we treat derivative works, even in some cases original works,  but this idea of “orphaned” content is ill-conceived and overreaching. And worse, with the addition of “commercial permissions” it fails to genuinely protect any of the free culture interests that spur me to support a change in copyright law.

As my husband points out, this bill seeks to “fuck the little guy with a big business dick”.

Moreover, as if all of this wasn’t bad enough, the bill will also remove the protection we all enjoy which allows our work—anyone’s work—to be copyright protected from creation. Every blog post I write, every doodle you draw on a napkin, etc, is, technically, copyright protected the moment you make your idea visible and/or concrete. No longer. This bill will require that you apply for a copyright for any new item you create—and any older works you’d want protected as well.

The current copyright law, which allows work to be protected from creation, supports free culture. It means that I have the luxury of writing this blog post, contributing to my community, without fear that my words will be taken from me and used by some megacorporation to further line their billion dollar pockets. It means that I have the freedom to create with wild abandon, without worry that my voice will be appropriated into a context I do not support. And the more creators that do this, the more people that contribute their voices and talents to the culture pool, the richer our culture becomes. People need to have the supported freedom to create and contribute.

This bill seeks to take that all away. This isn’t free culture. This is culture at a very steep, perhaps unattainable, price.

Write to your congressman.  Make it an action item on your Hipster PDA. Or do it right now. But whatever you do, don’t “plan” to do it. Just do it. Don’t let them erode the foundation free culture is built upon.