The Artists's Work

In modern capitalist, market-driven societies, human labour is commodified.  It is a product for sale to the highest bidder (where 'bidding' is taken to mean giving someone a job - an odd sort of role reversal, in that it implies that the employer is the one attempting to convince the worker to provide their services, whereas in the vast majority of cases the reverse is true -- but that's a subject for an entirely different post.)  Workers sell their labour time as a 'factor of production'; just one of the components that goes into the production of a service or saleable object.  This is why Marx referred to the labour of workers under capitalism as 'alienated'; they do not, in any real sense, own their labour and emphatically do not own the products of it.  From the moment they star their shift at the factory or on the sales floor or in the cubicle, their time belongs to the company and the work they do is not their own, but the company's work.  Only capitalist 'entrepreneurs', the creators of enterprises, truly own the time they are putting into their businesses, in addition to the commodified time they have purchased from their employees; only the labour of entrepreneurs is inalienable, and only entrepreneurs have the right to keep what is produced by their labour: profit.

The work of the artist cuts through this system in some interesting ways.  I'll leave aside for a moment the examination of collaborative media and focus on types of art in which a single worker is typically responsible for the production of a complete work -- the writer, the painter, the sculptor.  It is entirely possible for these workers to sell alienated labour as a commodity, 'creative workers' producing on demand the images required of them by managers incapable of artistry themselves; but this is widely considered a debased form of 'true art', and those who engage in it are in a significant sense not true artists for all that they are engaging in essentially the same activities.  In order to be a true artist, then, the worker must be self-directed.  They must produce only at their own demand; their labour must remain inalienable.

This, of course, creates a problem for the artist living in a capitalist society.  After all, everyone needs money to keep a roof over their head and food in the pantry.  If a person is to devote enough of their time to self-directed work to create significant works of art, they cannot afford to sell much of their time as commodity labour -- to engage in by far the most common and socially approved method of securing an income.  In a sense all true artists are entrepreneurs.  If they are to make a living, they must find ways to profit from their labour, to commodify and monetize what they have produced.

Art is an intrinsically different kind of work from the production of most goods and services, because what artists produce is essentially information.  It is a novel arrangement of symbols designed to produce a reaction in the human mind.  As such, a particular piece of art is not best used if its message is experienced by only one person, if it is 'consumed' as a good service; art demands an audience, a noun which is inherently collective.  This presents an even greater barrier to the process of commodification; not only is it difficult to get any one particular person to pay an amount of money for a piece of art commensurate with the labour that went into it, but it flies in the face of the purpose of art, to communicate with as many people as possible.  A painting which is bought by a rich person and secreted away in a room where only they can appreciate is simply not fulfilling its intended purpose the way a painting hanging in a public gallery is.  Furthermore, an artist lives and dies by their reputation, by convincing people to desire and seek out their future work, and for a reputation to be built, as many people as possible must be allowed to experience the messages which the artist's work communicate.

Society has a vested interest to encourage the production of art, which most of us agree it's important to have in our lives; even as a large segment of society looks down on art as being somehow superfluous or as not real work, I think even they would find their enjoyment of life considerably impoverished if all art disappeared, or even if all artists gave it up and got jobs in the workaday world.  To this end we have created certain tools in an attempt to bridge the tension between the need for the artist to monetize their work and their need for an audience.  One such tool is copyright.  It's a strange beast, a kind of property right which applies not to an object but to an idea -- an arrangement of symbols, a piece of information.  In the vast majority of cases, once a product has been sold, its producer -- be they a crafter who created it entirely through their own labour, or a conglomerate which combined the alienated labour of several workers to produce it and then sold it for a profit -- have no further claim on the object in question.  It becomes the sole property of its purchaser, who can do with it what they wish.  Copyright interferes with the property right of a purchaser by enjoining them from copying the artwork they have paid for and profiting from the sale of these copies.  It is an attempt to ensure that, in disseminating their work to the public, the artist is not forfeiting their livelihood, their ability to monetize their work by producing copies for sale to their audience.  It was intended to be a fairly simple arrangement.

In the intervening years, large industries have grown up around the process of commodifying the work of artists.  I will again focus on publishing, the industry with which I am most familiar.  Traditionally, a writer sends a manuscript to a publisher.  If accepted, the writer assigns part or all of the copyright for their work to the publisher in exchange for a percentage royalty of all sales.  The publisher then employs workers to proofread the manuscript, typeset and print it, design a cover, market the book and offer it for sale through retail outlets.  This is a beneficial arrangement for both parties, as it has traditionally required a lot of work and capital to print books and to market them throughout large territories.  Publishers make a profit by keeping the lion's share of sales; writers receive a reasonable income while retaining the freedom to pursue their work, and are relieved of most of the burdens of commodifying their work and finding an audience.  However, it does introduce a degree of exploitation into the artist's life.  Their labour remains inalienable, at the cost of alienating their copyright, their legal right to directly profit from the production and sale of their own work.  In other industries, those like film production and music recording where greater capital investment and collaboration between artists have been necessary, the exploitative nature of the relationship between the artist and the production company is considerably more intense; it is routine for copyrights to be owned by large companies rather than any of the artists which created the work.

The rise of the internet has changed things considerably for many artists.  Where once copying a work of art such as a book or a recorded song was a fairly labour- and capital-intensive process which benefited considerably from economies of scale, it is now trivial.  Where distributing these copies once required shipping trucks and stores constructed of brick and mortar, all it now requires is the touch of a button.  The rug has been completely pulled out from under the industries of art commodification and their comfortable, exploitative relationship with artists.  Their entire raison d'etre has disappeared.  Of course there is still plenty of room for a publisher to be profitable by embracing the tools provided by the internet, as the success of Amazon among other has shown; but the relationship between writer and publisher is changing dramatically, and companies which are heavily invested in a particular way of doing things are having trouble keeping up.  And under capitalism, when large and powerful corporations are threatened, they have a tendency to lash out, using their money and power to crush that threat.

This is not about 'piracy', the infringement of copyrights by people sharing copies of movies and music over the internet.  For artists, finding an audience is more important in the long run than monetizing every individual copy of their work.  The notion that 'nobody will pay' for what they can get for free is shown for a lie by the thousands of artists who have found ways of effectively monetizing work that they have deliberately released to be shared without charge.  The only challenge is finding the effective ways of balancing the need for an income with the need for an audience -- the problem which copyright was originally created to address.

What this is about is control -- not of content, but of artists.  Production companies don't want to have to give up that comfortable, exploitative relationship.  They don't want to give up the position of power, from which they are able to dictate terms.  Technology allowed them to put artists in a role where their inalienable labour could be artificially, synthetically alienated using the legal tool of copyright; and now that technology has undermined this role, they want it reconstructed using a new legal framework.  The problem with this is that technology is a fact of nature, whereas laws are a social fact; thus, technology simply works the way it works, whereas laws require social enforcement in order to work.  That is why, no matter how harsh the measures taken against 'pirates' become, they will simply not suffice to achieve these companies' aims.  The intenet was designed to allow communication in the event of all-out nuclear war.  A few petty laws are not going to stop it from fulfilling its function.