A world without copyright?

Copyright has a cultural purpose; it motivates artists by enabling them to profit from their work, and prevents others from exploiting them for their own profit. But as Ted explained in our lecture, modern copyright law is becoming increasingly out of touch with the way artists of all sorts communicate with their audiences. The digital era we are currently in has provided us with the opportunity to become produsers; reproducing and distributing digital work extremely cheaply, and to a high quality. It would seem that copyright and intellectual property laws would be more important than ever due to the simplicity of exploiting artists work.

This thinking, however, goes against Stewart Brand’s “information wants to be free” argument and underestimates the extent of the cultural changes we are living through.  Because of the enormity of the internet, and the global markets that are a consequence of this, the modern problem for artists is not about protecting their work, but more about ensuring it is visible. In this economy of abundance, artists must be prepared for the fact that if they are not willing to give away their work for free, someone else will. So is copyright still enforceable? And does a world without copyright mean a world without incentive for creativity?

I really don’t think it does. From an historical perspective, we may note that the concept of private intellectual property rights has traditionally been absent from most cultures, yet there has always been artists who have created and performed works.  In the digital age, the eradication of copyright laws would enable an interesting production of creativeness, with people finding inspiration, themes, or certain forms of expression in works previously produced, both long ago and recently.  Girl Talk is a noteworthy case study of this. His music is entirely created through remixes of other people’s music, so does he breach copyright laws? And for an even better question… should he?

I do think some sort of regulation should be implemented, as you can see in the below Gotye documentary, artists work so hard to be unique and they definitely deserve to reap the rewards from the work they put in. But as you can also see in the documentary, artists as individual as Gotye still source inspiration from past creations, possibly breaching copyright. How far should lending and borrowing of inspiration go before the law should step in? And will our creative culture suffer if we do move into a world without copyright?

Thoughts very much welcome.