Copyleftism rather than copyright? Mark Amerika argues that authors should be exploiting the attention-economy rather than clinging to outmoded copyright laws. Join the discussion and let us know what YOU think...
For me, the act of writing, of committing myself to alternative modes of cultural production, *is* survival. Copyright is meant to protect my work from being stolen and used for profit which may have had some value in the days of "gentlemanly" book publishing. Those were the days when literary authors were considered artists who needed nurturing and the support that was being offered by the publishers was meant to develop great work. That approach is absolutely *dead* in the age of multi-national corporate publishing, a publishing system that sees authors as media commodities and whose lawyers play the copyright card to protect the moneyed interests (that is, corporate interests).
Author-artists today need to "cash in" on the rarest commodity of all and that’s *attention itself*. The way to do this is to practice "copyleftism", a process whereby they distribute their work for free over the Internet and allow others to also distribute their work for free. This increases their network-value in the attention-economy which consequently leads to other value-added opportunities which may lead to extra income.
This does not mean that someone can take your work and sell it for a profit without your permission, nor does it mean that someone who commissions a new work from you should not have to pay. But it does allow for the free flowing distribution of work so that it may locate an audience of network-support ready to do business. In the Western world, this is called building community.
Copyright has applications in print culture because its objecthood is decidedly material. But with electronic hypermedia, the work’s objecthood is decidedly virtual and infinitely reproducible with an ease of network distribution that is out of control. So to try and force the current copyright laws upon the network culture, as the copyright maximalists and recording industry lawyers are eager to do, is a bit nutty, and works against the spirit of the net. I’d say that if you don’t want your work to be reproduced and manipulated over the network spectrum, then don’t put it on the web. Why use outmoded copyright laws to protect yourself from your potential audience?
It doesn’t take authorial genius to recognize that there are very few innovative writers or artists today who are able to survive simply by selling their "intellectual property" to the multi-national corporate sponsors located throughout the global economy. In fact, one line of thought making its way through the art-world party scene, a bastardized version of a previous thought developed by Antonin Artaud, is that there really are no more literary masterpieces, just hefty media by-products that occasionally get picked up by the self-replicating mainstream media virus and that are sold to consumers as off-the-shelf "cultural objects" they must own the same way they must own a sports utility vehicle or the latest Braun coffee-maker.
In this scenario, there are no readers, only consumers, and, in fact, it’s now often suggested that there are "literally" tons of books that get sold but that never get read, that the reason they’re bought is not so much to be read and appreciated as works of literary art but, rather, to be installed on bookshelves as a brand-name product identifying the owner of said product with a degree of cultural sophistication they can buy but never actually immerse themselves in. The book-object as living room sculpture.
If the reason you write is to make money, then naturally the idea of "copyleftism" will be unappealing to you. But if you write because you want to experiment with the formal possibilities of the creative process and seek to locate a niche audience of readers within the global marketplace, then the way around this problem is to start exploring the potential of the new media associated with the net. Once your work circulates within the network, its value, whether that be monetary, literary, intellectual, whatever, will make itself apparent. Meanwhile, if you depend on the corporate publishers to do your circulating for you, then your value becomes distorted and you become co-dependent on their willingness, or lack thereof, to take risks with your work. It would seem to me that the artists themselves would be well advised to take their own risks.
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