04 October 2009 — More on Public Domain Art
My piece on public domain art was posted on Meanjin's blog Spike today. It drew a reasonable response from Paul Squires, referring to my comment that freedom of use is "by itself, a good thing for art":
For the hundredth time. This is not a good thing for art because it means you will not have professional artists with time and energy to create extraordinary works of art. Except for ones from a certain socio-economic and educational background. Do you want this to happen?
As I posted in reply over at Spike, I think Squires missed my point about it being good "by itself": that is, divorced from the other implications, such as loss of income for artists. I actually agree with Squires about the danger of loss of royalty income making it impossible for artists to dedicate serious amounts of time working on their art. Instead, like most artists I know – who aren't well-known enough to really get much in the way of royalties –, they would have to spend the majority of their time working in a regular job.
However, there are counter-arguments to this position. Firstly, one of the hidden premises is that the average level of quality of work created by full-time professional artists is higher than that created by those people who work regular jobs to support their art. This may be true, but it can't simply be taken as fact. Moreover, if it isn't true, then it puts the rest of the argument on shaky ground. Remember, this isn't a point about the poor people involved in the creation, but the suggestion that the quality suffers as a result of artists losing royalty payments.
Secondly, people may be surprised to know how many people take their art very seriously, yet have no particular desire to earn an income from it. I was speaking to a drummer friend of mine recently about the idea of royalties, and his perspective was that he wouldn't care if someone used his music without paying him. Sure, he said, he would always appreciate the money, but he's under no illusions that he is going to make a living off of music in the first place: it's not something that he regards as fundamentally important.
This is a concept that I find hard to support myself, because earning a living from making music is something that I aspire to do. I can't imagine continuing to dedicate the same amount of time to music that I do currently, if I am unable to eventually make some kind of profit from it. But I'm only one person. And, counter to the implication made by Squires, I'm the one with the well-off background and tertiary education, not my friend (I'm not, therefore, suggesting that the correlation is backwards, but that I'm not sure there is one to be made at all).
Royalties are, of course, one of the few streams of revenue that popular artists can still rely on to make some money from, and in this era of uncertainty in the music industry, it can seem a little off to suggest that artists should give this up, along with album sales. However, my original post was explicitly about Michael Jackson. That is, it was a post about dead artists, not live ones. While there is still, obviously, an argument to be made about continuing to pay royalties to copyright holders after an artist's death, it's a separate one, and not the argument Squire put forth in his comment.