THE NEW ARTIST IS BRED

 

Lawrence Lessig believes that ultimately it will be code instead of law that regulates Internet use. Lessig’s Free Culture supports and protects the creative output of visual fine artists while rights including term of copyright and derivative use, must be limited. The motivation behind the Free Culture is to encourage creation of innovative art form transformations made legally by the technological tools available on the web. Other scholars have developed alternative solutions to Lessig’s Free Culture including:

• Paul Goldstein’s economic model where everyone has access to every piece of work ever made and to be allowed to view the image, it would cost a fee. To save the image to a disk would cost a greater fee and to transform and manipulate the image would cost an even greater fee.

• Proposed by William Fisher, Neil Netanel and other based off of another economic model. Copyrighted works would be capable of being transmitted online to be registered at a central location. The creators of the work are then paid by the federal government in proportion to the sale or consumption of the work. The money would come from a pool of taxes imposed on Internet access and the sale of consumer devices like DVDs and recorders.

• A voluntary system like the government model is being developed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard where artists would voluntarily register their work with a private organization and would be paid form membership fees from subscribers to the organization

A movement founded in 2001 by Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain and other scholars called the Creative Commons Movement permits the artist to decide which parts of the copyright they wish to keep and what they will give up. Something like this already exists in New York at the Artist’s Rights Society that serves as a clearinghouse for rights and permissions for those that want to reproduce works in printed and electronic media. Prominent artists with membership include Picasso and Warhol.

In the end, artists crave recognition and compensation when their art is used and a private system like the Creative Commons movement with voluntary participation is reasonable while a system that requires all works to be registered electronically and payments derived from federal taxes from Internet related devices is unrealistic and unworkable politically.

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