"FREE CULTURE?" - PART ONE

These days I’m trying to resist the temptation to contribute to message boards whose fine print tells me they own the copyright to my posts. Nor do I write reviews in places like imdb.com anymore, which was really tempting because I’ve always enjoyed writing film reviews in various places from time to time (for which I was always paid, even if only a few cents per word). But Amazon does the same thing as the message boards: you post on imdb, they say, and they own it. Without paying for it. And some, though hardly most, of their posters write really well, I think. Why they’d give it away is a mystery to me. I'm even mystified that I did it myself a few times before waking up to how self-defeating an activity it was for someone who makes a living selling his ideas.

I also think that if someone challenged these policies by, say, "reprinting" on their own blog something they posted elsewhere and claiming copyright to it, they’d prevail in court. But, as we all know, justice in this country costs money. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re ultimately judged to be on the right side of the issue; you still have to have deep pockets just to get your day in court. Unless you’re lucky enough to be a defendant whose plight seems such an injustice that it inspires a legal defense fund.

I imagine there may be some people reading this who think I’m the Antichrist when they scroll down to the bottom and see that I copyright this page and reserve all rights to the material I post here. Which brings me to my puzzlement of the day and probably the rest of this week: why anyone should find it objectionable for a writer, or any Creative, to protect their work and profit from it, rather than making it available for free. Whatever happened to the idea that everyone has a right to make a living, and when was that right revoked or denied for Creatives?

I’ve been advised that my posts are too long for most people who enjoy reading blogs, which, as a dedicated salon.com reader, baffles me. But I’ll take them at their word. (For me, this is a short post.) So this is the first installment of a long essay I've written, which I’ll now break up into daily installments.

In the days ahead I’ll be talking about such phenomena as the logic-challenged Free Culture Movement and the fact that scholarly criticism is dying and critics are losing their jobs because of the bizarre belief that they’ve been made obsolete by all the free -- and usually woefully uninformed -- opinions available on the Internet. And then there is the phenomenon of You’re-Talented-If-America-Votes-For-You, regardless of the fact that the only contestant on American Idol to have achieved anything really impressive in show business was Jennifer Hudson, who, if memory serves, was voted off Rupert Murdoch’s island.

(So as not to deny Kelly Clarkson her due, I'll concede that it's my personal biases that make an Academy Award more significant to me than multi-platinum bubble-gum albums with clunky titles like "My Life Would Suck Without You." And, CDs notwithstanding, does anyone even remember who the hell Ruben Studdard is any more?)

So if you keep coming back here, you’re in for maybe a week of arguments asserting the value of elites where the arts –- not politics or governance -- are concerned. And arguments against the idea that Information Wants To Be Free (which may be arguable, but, then, Information doesn’t have a mortgage). All this plus a host of other ideas that will probably piss off readers and, not incidentally, maybe give me a better sense of how many people are actually reading this until I have time to add a counter and start getting some real metrics.

Not that I enjoy or aspire to pissing people off; I just know that it’s a good way to get their attention. And once I have that, I’d like to try to get them thinking about some things they may not have considered before. See you tomorrow?