It's All About Mickey Mouse: SOPA and the reality of cultural production

Someone asked me to explain why I'm blacking out on January 18th.

I'd like to be upfront about this: it is not simply the SOPA bill that I oppose. It is the entire way in which the concept of intellectual property has evolved.

The US Constitution was one of the few national documents to enshrine the concept of copyright into its founding documents, and here is the part that counts: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Why for a 'limited time"?

Because very wise people, who were themselves creators of both scientific and cultural content, understood that we do not create in a vacuum. That, although it is practical and ethical to ensure that authors and inventors should have a monopoly to benefit from their for a period of time, a vibrant culture needs soil to grow in. The public domain is the soil from which new cultural work grows.

Go take a browse through gutenberg.org or archive.org. All those 'original' pieces of cultural wealth are based on others. If Shakespeare or Emily Bronte were writing today, they'd be too busy fighting off lawsuits to produce anything. The truth is that none of us have utterly original thoughts. We feed off each other. Culture IS, in many ways, remix.

I support a very limited and once-renewable copyright law. 14 years with the option to renew for another 14. After 28 years, I'm very happy to see my work go into the public domain and become fertilizer for the next generation of creatives.

The truth is, the people who are lobbying hard for SOPA and other bills like it don't give a shit about anything other than their profits. They have no respect of the creators of the works they act as middle-men for. They don't care if what they want results in the production of new creative works grinding to a halt. They will be happy to keep selling you old Dan Brown books with new covers and reissues of Lady Gaga until the cows come home.

Why do I know this? Well, consider this: next time you buy a song off iTunes, consider that the credit card company you put the transaction through earns a higher percentage of that sale than the artist whose song you're purchasing does. That's the reality.

So. What can you do about it?

Please do not support legislation like SOPA. Please do not support legislation that extends copyright times to benefit the middlemen rather than the creatives who produced the work. When possible, please purchase creative works from the independent and small companies that release them and cut the middlemen out.  And please respect the legitimate and legal copyright of creatives whenever it is possible for you to do so. Notice I qualify that? It's because I don't believe that publishers should be able to hang onto the copyright of books they have allowed to go out of print. If they can't be fucked to make it available for money, then they don't deserve to sit on that work in virtual perpetuity. The rights should revert back to the author, or where the author is dead, they should go into the public domain.

For more on these issues, read Jessica Litman's Digital Copyright (available free as a PDF download), Julie E. Cohen's The Place of the User in Copyright Law , a wonderful TED talk by Lawrence Lessig: Laws that Choke Creativity , James Boyle: The Public Domain – Enclosing the Commons of the Mind and finally, and brilliantly, a look at how the mythology of how copyright might not be as economically beneficial to authors as is commonly assumed: Michelle Boldrin's 'Against Intellectual Monopoly'.

All of these texts are downloadable free or readable online.