We got an email today from an astroturfing (look it up) “charity” called Creative America. Creative America (funded by the studios and unions) wants to expand the movement for intellectual property security. That sounds like a good thing, right? Right?? Wrong.

When distributors regularly take producers’ works and make profits from those works but don’t pay the creative talent a realistic return because they allegedly spent all the money on distribution and marketing, that’s content theft. When Instagram asserts that it “does not claim ownership” of your pictures but claims a “fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license”, that’s content theft. When a studio takes taxpayer money (incentives) to produce a film but avoids paying taxes on a billion-dollar grossing movie by creating subsidiaries to hide the income, that’s another kind of theft. Maybe content theft should be the name given to the RIAA campaign to deprive recording artists of residuals from radio airplay. That one was pretty blatant theft because it’s not standard practice in most other countries. Or is content theft what happens when Disney perverts the law intended to encourage creativity by having the copyright term extended to life plus 75 years?

None of these things help me, the creative monkey who dances when someone pays the organ grinder. The only thing which helps me is when producers, distributors and/or studios or clients invest in NEW work and pay a realistic amount for that. That doesn’t mean bullshit tentpole sequel movies with overpriced stars and under-written scripts. Uwe Boll is the poster child for movies that fail despite big names, big marketing and being created on the backs of related successful franchises. That model doesn’t work. What actually works is new movies that the public can afford to see without add-on price-hyping gimmicks like 3D or IMAX, without outdated distribution methods and “windows”, and with realistic marketing and marketing budgets based on realistic expectations of the actual value of the intellectual property. New good work where everyone working gets paid at a realistic, reasonable rate.

And take that further, new work where everyone involved shares in the success through residuals. New work is the only thing which helps me. None of the posturing. None of the criminalizing. Not SOPA. Not PIPA. Not threats of 35 years of imprisonment which is what these companies demanded for Aaron Swartz, the co-creator of RSS who committed suicide this weekend after being hounded with legal threats generated by the interests of these parasites. None of that helps. Just bookings for work where the profits are shared equitably with the participants instead of siphoned off by a few at the top. That’s what helps me.

So, yes. Content theft. A red herring to fuck up the creative world of the internet. Where studios don’t have to produce a damn thing, just keep milking the money cow and attacking creativity in the world where the rest of us live. This attitude has become pervasive. Distributors and agents are demanding releases for images of property that is so far out of copyright it’s a joke (eg. European castles). Yet this protectionism only works in one direction. Getty Images pissed photographers off royally this week by freely giving pictures to Google for them to sublicense without attribution or recompense. Hollywood has enough money to employ shills but not to actually make movies without taxpayer handouts (aka incentives) while avoiding actually paying tax back into the system. It’s fucking remarkable.

How the did copyright law become this screwed up by companies that don’t actually pay fucking income tax? This nonsense has been tried since movies first began, with Edison and his compatriots seeking to monopolise the film industry through use of patents a century ago. Trying to control access didn’t work then and won’t work now. Independent artists, distributors and exhibitors have always been extremely important in the world of the arts but now we have threats of life incarceration for copying publicly available documents—not secrets, but academic journals; work in the public domain. Meanwhile bankers and CEOs blatantly destroy jobs, create homelessness, steal pensions and launder money for terrorists. Terrorists, you know, people who actually fucking blow other people to bits, shoot our troops, kill and maim for their cause—banks can help fund those guys and there are no consequences because something like “HSBC is too big to jail” so is therefore outside the law? But distributing the results of publicly funded research—papers actually in the public domain—might be grounds for effectively ending an individual’s life?

Current intellectual property law is outdated and nonsensical. Academics are showing support for Mr Swartz by actively tweeting links to PDF’s of their journal articles. [http://gizmo.do/UZL8zZG]. Did you know that the only reason prints of Nosferatu still exist is because of piracy and subverting copyright? In the real world, Disney should never get to own your arm just because you got a tattoo of Mickey Mouse. In the real world, the rules should apply equally to the little guy and the big corporation. The so-called creative industry needs to get sensible about what makes art, instead of hoping art “just happens” like a natural bodily function in a world where we see identical bland sedans being burped out by every single car company on the planet. And Government needs to embrace its role in this with better access to information in the digital age instead of trying to kill the messenger (or finding some dubious sex charges to keep him locked up in Scandinavia).

The GOP had a wonderful opportunity for real IP reform during last year’s elections. Imagine, a real platform that Republicans could use with strong appeal to young voters and the tech-savvy Generations X, Y and Z. This was a platform they could have used to actually change and improve lives. Instead, the paid-for politicians retracted the Republican Study Committee Intellectual Property Brief [https://www.eff.org/document/rsc-report-three-myths-about-copyright-law], a report which would have simplified the legislation and actually encouraged creativity. And last month the GOP fired its author Derek Khanna.

Democrats are no better when it comes to embracing the potential of the internet and fair access to everything it can provide. Notwithstanding the attacks on investigative journalism through misuse of the Espionage Act of 1917, last year saw Obama’s Whitehouse demanding tougher federal penalties for suspected copyright infringement, including adding copyright to the list of serious crimes that can justify wiretapping in the expanded Patriot Act. Imagine, copyright is now as serious as blowing up a plane full of people. Unless you’re a banker.

Tough laws, harassment and life sentences for copying and distributing work, especially work in the public domain, is bullshit. If it didn’t work with the dismal failure of a war on drugs, how can it work in a war on access to artistic works? Obviously the old paradigm is dead in a world where everyone is connected, in the world of the internet. If a motion picture production company can’t make money within 10-20 years of creating a film, then chances are pretty high that it wasn’t commercially viable. You don’t need life plus 75 years to create a library of financial flops in the hopes of a long tail well after the author’s children are collecting pensions. And at the same time, we can clearly see that the Department of Justice doesn’t give a shit when an offender is rich, which just tells us that these so-called get-tough policies are really only about who is paying whom. The goal shouldn’t be to create bigger legal departments but to create art.

So, our message to Creative America is, no. No, you’re not. You’re not creative in any sense of the word other than creative lying, bullshit and ignorance. Get fucking real and we might have something to talk about. Right now, we don’t. Go back and read Derek Khanna’s RSC brief and start working towards that kind of system. You need to understand that copyright is a bargain between the public and the creators, trading some freedoms in return for more artistic works. Until you understand that copyright is ultimately about what benefits the public, first and foremost, you’re a bunch of astroturfing shills, riding the backs of truly creative people and doing nothing to help them.

——–

Updated Jan 4, 2018: because scribd.com have ironically used electronic protection to prevent downloading the text of Derek Khanna’s RSC brief. Nevertheless, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has made it accessible