As today (Jan 18 in the USA) is internet strike day* - I'm posting my thoughts on copyright in support of the global anti-SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) strike
One of the other things art-career-wise that I've been thinking a lot about over the past few months is
copyright
(ahhhh THIS little image, created as part of my stint at Byron Bay August 2011
has already been used - without seeking my permission - to promote a literary prize.....
guys guys guys - all you had to do was ask!)
Like
many other artists I'm unsure how to respond when folk race off with my
images or words or what-nots and re-present them in other places
(internet or other) without my knowledge or consent... Oh I'm flattered
of course - I mean, how sweet is it that they liked my things enough to
want to share them?.....
BUT I've not been so thrilled
when my stuff is posted randomly without even acknowledging (or
linking) to the source.... and I get totally miffed when folk TAKE my
work and then pass it off as their own.... (and no I don't mean they
make similar work or works 'inspired by' yours - I mean they STEAL your
stuff)...
I've had a variety of experiences where folk
have indeed STOLEN my stuff and passed it off as their own.... dating
back to the early 1990s (when my work appeared in an Australian 'Vogue
Living' magazine - credited to someone else) to present times (about 18
months ago my partner listened, mouth agape, to an ABC radio interview
with an artist whose work was featuring in the opening of a regional
gallery show in our state - the artist actually submitted one of my
artwork statements as theirs, and it soon became apparent they had
created a work identical to
something of mine and passed it off as their 'original idea and
creation' .... I mean - WTF?????????!!!!!)
things don't need to be this dramatic to be just as troublesome....
I'll
bet pretty much every visual artist who has entered artwork in a
competition or exhibition has signed some sort of form that gives the
event organisers the right to reproduce their work in various ways and
means (sometimes the fine print can be scary - I have friends who have
inadvertently signed away their control on a simple entry form... and
unscrupulous event organisers who have subsequently made commercial work
for resale as a result... nasty wot?!)
'to the lighthouse' ephemeral installation
Cape Byron lighthouse
2011
and
you have NO idea the trouble I went through last year to create an
acceptable 'recording' agreement with Northern Rivers Writers Centre (in
a nutshell - NRWC sent me their standard recording agreement designed
for writers to be filmed - essentially their standard recording
agreement would have stripped me of my rights to even take a picture of
my visual artwork undertaken as part of my stint as artist in residence
at their Writers Festival - needless to say - changes were made!)
yep copyright can be mighty tricky
On
the other side of the copyright coin however is the increasing public
loss of access to our shared cultural material with the rise and rise of
the corporatisation of EVERYTHING. And of course it's not just (or even
primarily) arty things that are at risk... think about the
ramifications of one company owning the rights to all our food seeds
(this is SCARY and it's happening right now), or another company
patenting parts of the human genome (yep - it's happened already), or
mon-satan (the misspelling is deliberate) who currently enjoy suing
farmers and associated ag businesses for patent infringement when their
GM crops (soy beans and canola in particular) spread to non-GM crops
(bastards!!! on every level)
As I often repeat - I'm
just a small arteest living a long way from anywhere - the issue of
copyright infringement must be absolutely overwhelming for big name, big
time artists (and I can't imagine the full ramifications of rampant
piracy in music/film/literature)....
As we all know -
once something is out there on the interweb, there's no controlling
where it goes - and there's certainly no getting it back - the internet
has made copying/duplication/reblogging/mashing/'collaging'/ sampling of
any material super fast and easy... all this sharing and copying and
re-creation is good and great and fun... and a bloody copyright
nightmare!
what to do? what to do?
Should we visual artists watermark every photo?
(Fugg-ly!), upload only itty bitty images? (why bother?), use right
click disable? (easy to work around - take a screen shot and share a
crappy version of the work instead), use spaceball gifs? (oh if you
don't know what a spaceball gif is - its a transparent gif that is
placed over your photo - when folk try to right-click-copy your image they get
the transparent gif instead.... spaceball gifs are ridiculously easy to
work around... hint - there's a 1mm gap at the bottom of the image that
the gif doesn't cover....), become paranoid and stop making and sharing
things? (now there's an effective idea... not!), resign yourself to rampant
copyright incursions and graciously accept piracy? (ummmm????? eeeek - starvation days ahead) make work and make it
freely available and rejoice in a new arty world order? (still starving over here...)
And here's where my own little copyright conundrum kicks into high gear...
I
like sharing things - I'm happiest when I give things away - I'm not a
fan of the corporatisation of art (or the corporatisation of
anything...) I have no desire to be a multi-millionaire vacuous art
star (puke!) But like you, I DO need to eat and pay my bills (the
electricity mob don't take vegetables as payment... more's the pity).
And I don't think its right at any point to TAKE something from someone
else and call it your own....
I've met wonderful
friends via blogging and various social media platforms (SU, facebook,
twitter, tumblr, ning-rings etc) without these innovative platforms the
internet would be a very different place and without these (free!)
services my world would be very different.... I'm not convinced that
SOPA will do much to help stop piracy (which was its initial aim) but
will instead become a quasi form of censorship, and a tool for
corporations to further erode the commons....
So here's my first step in trying a new direction with my web copyright
You
may have noticed I've recently adopted a Creative Commons license
associated with this blog. For those of you not completely aware of CC
licenses - here's the crux of things in one sentence:
"With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify"
My
decision to go with a CC is an acknowledgment that culture only
flourishes when we operate as a cooperative community. True, I've chosen
the most rigid CC license (attribution, non-commercial, no
derivatives).... but a CC license just reminds folk that its only right
to link and attribute things correctly. With CC in place - all I ask is -
when you share, please maintain a link to the source... it's the right
thing to do.
*as
Oz is on the other side of the international date line, it wasn't
really feasible to set my blog site to join the Jan 18 internet black
out - if I coulda - I woulda!
follow these links to find out more about SOPA and the strike:
google action
protect the internet for innovators
strike!
...
