Lethem Takes the Fight to the People
Jonathan Lethem is the author of the best-selling novel "The Fortress of Solitude" and winner of the MacArthur "genius grant." Further, he is the author a recent article in Harper's which I mentioned earlier.
In a way no lawyer can, Lethem is tackling copyright reform. Wired News reports that he is selling stories to dramatists and filmmakers for a dollar each. As a writer and music fan, he recognizes the value of adaption and derivation. To this end, he wants to create a world where artists dictate the terms of use for their works.
Listening to Lethem, one imagines a world where every artist crafts an idiosyncratic copyright notice, with its own strange rules, to adorn the front page or liner notes or gallery notice fronting her creations.
This approach, to me, seems burdensome to those who want to create using other material. If I have to read a new agreement every time I want to use a work, my desire to create will decrease. Instead, the Creative Commons practice of standardized licenses seems to allow artists to understand a half-dozen limitations as opposed to thousands.
What makes the most sense to you? Complete artist control or a set of commonly accepted tools?
3 comments:
Both make sense to me, and here's why. As it stands, there are lots of middlemen standing between popular artists/musicians and their public - notice I'm saying popular artists, the ones with publishers and studios and etc. to help them get their work out. These middlemen are the folks who take control of intellectual property away from artists because they have to maximize profit in order to be supported by the artist's work. As an artist, I would want to be able to tell someone directly, based on the circumstances, that they can use my work. However, I would also want some consistent guidelines, like Creative Commons, that can help me with licensing my work fairly. More artist control WITH commonly accepted tools - the best of both worlds!
Do you see Creative Commons as a "middleman"?
I actually see Creative Commons as a tool because I, as an artist and writer, can go on the site and select my own license. If I were to pay someone else to get that license for me, that would be a middleman.
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