You Are Not Entitled to Your Preferred Career

It’s been a while since I wrote about copyright, but a video I recently watched got me thinking about it again.

“And for those of you who think copyright shouldn’t exist at all: honestly, you need to think about that idea for even just one second before it falls apart. If there was no copyright to good ideas, regular people like you or me would never be able to rise on our own merit. All the best stories could just be legally stolen by huge corporations, and the entire cultural art and storytelling scene would be dominated by faceless, soulless corporations, Big Fat Liar style.” - LavenderTowne

Well, I am such a person, and I still don’t think copyright should exist. This line of reasoning is a common misconception of the actual purpose of copyright that people don’t tend to think about. And I don’t blame most people for falling for it. Our education system has done a good job selling copyright as a law for the small author to protect themselves against plagiarism, but this flies in the face of the actual reason for which copyright was ever conceived in the first place and ignores the deeper consequences of allowing ourselves the mental shorthand offered by the concept of “intellectual property.”

Plagiarism is not Theft

In fairness to LavenderTowne and other proponents of this argument, copyright law in the United States literally does offer this protection against plagiarism for the little guy, but it does so in a contrived way: it makes an immaterial, intangible idea into one’s property, and using the idea of the copyright holder without their permission constitutes theft in the eyes of the law. And yet, these copyrightable ideas lack the essential attribute which made people come up with the idea of property in the first place: exclusivity.

Physical objects can only be used by one person at a time, and when we put work into creating or acquiring an object, we want some level of control over who else gets to use it and for what purposes. The idea of property really only came into being around the dawn of agriculture, when people began to invest serious resources into their homesteads. We couldn’t build a sustainable agricultural society without the concept of property, because nobody would want to put in the effort of running a farm if any dickhead could come take your hard-earned produce or otherwise destroy it without consequences.

Ideas are not like this. Once someone has an idea, they can share it with others without destroying or compromising the integrity of the original. If I visit your house, find a book on your shelf, and make a copy for myself, I have not deprived you of anything (ignoring the time it would take me to copy it, during which you wouldn’t be able to read it). The classic “you wouldn’t steal a car” line holds no weight under scrutiny: if I could make a perfect copy of someone else’s car for myself without depriving them of theirs, why shouldn’t I?

LavenderTowne and others will be quick to point out that although I have not stolen your book or car in the above hypothetical, I have stolen something from the author of the book and the designers of the car: a sale. I could continue by asking them to demonstrate that I would have ever bought a copy of their book or car in the first place, but this essay is not about why I don’t believe in intellectual property.

The reason I bring all this up is to illustrate that ideas and physical objects are not analogous, and applying the concept of property to ideas leads to weird conceptions and consequences which I will explain later.

And so, let us get onto what this section is really about: plagiarism. In truth, plagiarism would still be against the law even if we abolished copyright today, because plagiarism is a form of fraud, which is already illegal for good reasons. We don’t need to impose the concepts of property and theft onto it when we already have a distinct concept which perfectly applies to the situation we’re talking about. A case could be made that the existing fraud statutes do not fully cover the nuances of protecting an author’s work, and that may well be true, but that is a matter of implementation detail, not the fundamental concept.

It is true that a career as an artist would look a lot different in a world without copyright, but that doesn’t mean it would be impossible. I’ll stick with the example of an author since that is the closest to the original concept of copyright.

Suppose I write a novel but lack the funds to publish physical books, so I decide to publish online. It erupts in popularity and acclaim, and a greedy publisher decides to “steal” it by printing physical copies of my novel and selling them to bookstores without paying royalties to me. They’d still put my name somewhere conspicuously on the printed books so as not to be plagiarists, but because the sequence of words which compose my novel are not my property, I have no means to force the publisher to pay me for reproducing them.

However, this need not be the end of my career. Assuming the critical acclaim of my work and the fact that my name is still associated with it, I would likely still be in demand for further work, and having established my reputation, I could then strike a deal with that same publisher (or perhaps their competitor) to be commissioned to author a sequel or an entirely new story to be published under their brand. Even without such deal brokering, I would likely still be invited to appear for book signing events or other such public appearances from which I could profit.

Although I would certainly take a hit to my revenues, it also certainly does not mean that a career as an author would be impossible.

It is here where I will bring up the true origin and purpose of copyright: to prevent competing publishers from copying one another’s books. Copyright did not exist until the days of the printing press, and it was conceived of only in the interest of the publishers to protect themselves from competitors. Copyright was not and has never been a law for the little guy but rather an instrument of control by big business to protect their interests, and it continues to function as such to this day, despite the happy accident of making it easier to have a career as an artist.

Let us now consider the effect that the concept of “intellectual property” has upon real, physical property.

When someone claims an intangible idea as their property, what does that actually mean? To “steal” someone’s idea is to reproduce an instance of it without their permission. This is not limited to creating physical instances and selling them for profit; it includes performing the work such as in a public reading.

Think about that for a moment. Their “property right” consists of a restriction of your very tongue. This has one amusing and illustrative consequence: because copyrightable ideas can be encoded and expressed digitally, this means it is illegal for you to tell someone certain numbers because they happen to represent someone else’s copyrightable work.

What I mean to draw attention to is this: the copyright holder’s “rights” manifest in the real world as a restriction upon your own body and physical property. It is a claim of authority which someone lays upon every member of society and any of their possessions which could conceivably create a copy of their so-called property.

This is a clear infringement upon the (much more important) right of free speech and expression by which we create works of art in the first place. And what do we gain in exchange for this price? Proponents will say that we gain all of our artistic culture and stories (see the quote at the beginning).

Artists and authors have created their work throughout millennia prior to the conception of copyright and yet longer before that concept expanded into what it has become today. Are we really to believe that the great artists of the past century would not have created their art without the ability to legally compel us not to share it with one another freely? Are we to believe that this is a serious consideration in the mind of a true artist and that all the artists of antiquity were foolish to ever try?

The Right to a Career

Even if we believe it to be true that an art career is impossible without copyright, why should we have ever expected it to be possible in the first place?

Almost no one makes their living doing whatever they want. In capitalism, it is the customer who decides. You only make money if you can satisfy someone else’s desires, and that’s usually pretty boring and repetitive stuff. Almost everyone had dreams and aspirations for their life that were never fulfilled, because the world wasn’t ready to hand them a living for doing that instead of making a burger or erecting a building.

People do want art. I want art, and I’m even willing to pay artists when I don’t have to. But why should we expect anyone to be able to make an entire career from just their art?

Making art is what makes us human. I question the humanity of anyone who has never in their life made some kind of art, however embarrassing. But of course not everyone can be a career artist, or else there’d be nobody growing the food. Being a career artist is a privilege, not a right, and I don’t think we should give up our actual important rights so lightly just so a few more can enjoy this privilege.

To those readers who are career artists, I hope you do not take this privilege for granted, and I hope we can have productive conversations about copyright going forward. And to the rest of you, I trust you’ll continue to make art anyway.