I usually watch Atun-Shei’s YouTube channel and I paid for the VHX release of The Sudbury Devil just hours after it was up since I had been looking forward to it so much.
Hearing him speak so candidly about the financing of his projects only makes me double down on my position that copyright isn’t doing a good job at providing for art and artists.
And these are even relatively speaking “success” stories, even though one of the films isn’t in the black yet. The situation is even worse for the long tail of “failed” or struggling independent artists. (One interesting note from his video is his friend with a more well-known movie that, after years, still hasn’t seen any money.)
Providing for artists is what I call “the first question” in my stance on copyright.
There needs to be another way to make sure that artists—that everyone—has what they need to live. That way should be set up so that copyright isn’t relied upon, isn’t needed, and then we can remove it.
I’m not saying suddenly pull the rug of copyright out under anyone’s feet. Not that that’s happening anytime soon, either: defeating copyright is going to be much harder than other forms of oppression since it’s all mired up in trade agreements and UN conventions.
Both of the ways these two projects were monetized rely on copyright and would’ve been impossible without copyright.
That monetization also had some drawbacks, which is what I’m talking about when I’m talking about copyright’s “second question”. The first film had to rely on time windows and paywalls which in turn created issues with connecting the movie up to people’s TVs without jumping through a ton of hoops. The second was connected to Google’s ad network, where not only are the ads annoying to watch and difficult to block, and not only do the ads fuel the consumerist nightmare candy shop we’re all trapped in, they also fuel Google’s “ad sense” network itself, one of the world’s largest and most evil businesses.
This sort of gunk and friction comes with the territory for trying to monetize based on copyright—that’s what the second question is: how can we make art free and unburdened by gunk and friction. This second question is so hard to even see for most of us since we’re not used to truly free culture, at least outside of nerd pursuits like Linux, Wikipedia and D&D. When D&D went proprietary in 2008 there was a backlash, and there was an even bigger outcry preventing that from happening again in early 2023. If Wikipedia were to go proprietary it would be a blow to human knowledge worse than the fires of Alexandria. It’s easier to see things we lose than to see things we’ve grown up being deprived from.
Our economic system never adapted to anything that has an expensive template with cheaper copies, like movies where producing the movie is expensive but making digital copies is way cheaper. We’ve been too stuck in a marketplace of exchanging one-for-one, a model that is fundamentally incompatible with “template” production.
Crowdfunding was initially conceived as a way out of this, as a way to finance truly free works unburdened by the gunk and friction of monetization. That’s not to say that crowdfunding doesn’t have its own issues, it does. Not only does it have the same dynamic of “success stories” vs “failures” as traditional monetization efforts have, there’s also a tend to shift some of the risk to the viewing public as in many cases part of the production isn’t even done before the campaign. So I’m not saying we have the answers yet.
I’m just saying that while copyright has a wreckingly bad non-answer to the second question, it doesn’t really do a good job with the first question either!
As I’ve said before:
The purpose of tech is to make our lives easier and cozier, but the forces of the quid-pro-quo labor market means that people still need to break their backs or hearts to put food on the table.
Without UBI, at best, we could invent better tools. More efficient shovels and hammers and rakes that let us dig deeper, hammer harder, rake faster. Without UBI, tech would let us get more done in a day, but it would not let us cut into that 40 hour workweek.
With UBI, the cornucopia might finally get within reach. The right to laziness, as Paul Lafargue put it in 1883. The right to dream and work and create and share and give freely without strings.
Some flavors of degrowth are halfway to realizing this. They correctly observe that while we’re drowning in tech and gadgets we’re still working as much.
But tech isn’t what’s causing all the work, market forces are. As long as we’re incentivized to sell our labor to survive then we’re incentivized to sell the entire week’s worth of it, no matter whether we’re working with stone axes or smart phones. That needs to change. We need protocol-level changes. Slack is more important than growth.