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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | *THIS TITLE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO A COPYRIGHT CLAIM
"It's pure theft, stolen from artists and quite frankly from the American people as a consequence of loss of jobs and as a consequence of loss of income." Joseph Biden, Vice President of the United States | |
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< | Increased intellectual property protections can stifle competition, harass average citizens, restrict creativity and have a chilling effect on free speech. Against these arguments, the entertainment industry presents a simple message, faithfully regurgitated by the Vice President above. While the numbers used to measure economic losses are questionable, this essay attempts to examine the other half of Hollywood's message: that piracy is stealing "from artists." In particular, the essay will focus on the fallacy that government support for the major copyright owners is a benefit to the creative artists, both present and future, who produce "television." | >
> | Increased intellectual property protections can stifle competition, harass average citizens, restrict creativity and have a chilling effect on free speech. Against these arguments, the entertainment industry presents a simple message, faithfully regurgitated by the Vice President above. While the numbers used to measure economic losses are questionable, this essay attempts to examine the other half of Hollywood's message: that piracy is stealing "from artists." In particular, the essay will focus on the fallacy that government support for the major copyright owners is a benefit to the creative artists, both present and future, who produce "television." | | |
TODAY'S CREATIVE ARTIST | |
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< | Work For Hire | | | "Isn't it great to live in a country where a cigar-smoking puppet and a bear that masturbates are considered 'intellectual property'?" Conan O'Brien, former host, "The Tonight Show" | |
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> | Work For Hire | | | Not only is Conan's self-stimulating bear property, it is NBC's property, despite the fact Conan created the character and developed it over a period of many years. Moreover, Jerry Seinfeld doesn't own "Seinfeld". Roseanne doesn't own "Roseanne." They are all "work for hire products."
As Eben has explained, the concept of work for hire began as an effort to incentivize printers to print literature. Perhaps it made sense to continue this incentivizing concept in the world of television, where production involved enormous up-front costs. However, the entertainment industry has abused the work for hire doctrine with the result that five companies now own the copyright to almost every modern American television show (see here, pp.354-55)
Today, the entertainment behemoths are still crucial to actually being on what we call television, but they are no longer necessary to producing "television": short, serialized video stories acted out by the same group of characters. The advent of digital film has allowed high-quality videos to be made on tiny budgets. The Internet provides an easy and free method of distribution. From the point of view of a creative artist, freedom from the shackles of the copyright industry creates enormous potential, both in the type of stories that artist will be able to tell and the manner in which she will be able to tell them. Increased copyright protection does not help these artists, it helps the content companies make the profits that keep those shackles firmly in place. | |
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< | What Stories Get Told | >
> | What Stories Get Told | | | That fact that the owners of the creative work aren't creative people but businessmen results in art being treated like any other product, which has a number of deleterious effects.
First, an artist's new, creative idea must compete directly with old ideas in the form of the dreaded "remake." Copyrights owners search out ways to make their stores of copyrighted material pay and pay again, even when those remakes fail and fail again. The desire to continue monetizing existing copyrighted material is a natural one for a business, but it quashes actual creativity that might otherwise flourish.
Second, the "productization" of television leads to the type of homogenized story telling we know all too well. The art is only useful so long as it sells advertising. This means that art must conform to particular (and sometimes ridiculous) content standards. Before HBO decided to produce "The Wire", its creator, David Simon, sent the network a letter in which he explained how a "cop drama" done outside of the network framework could be an entirely different form of television. HBO gave its approval and Simon proved that, freed from the artificial, commercially imposed restrictions of the traditional network model, even the much maligned television show could flourish as a work of art. | |
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< | How Stories Are Told | >
> | How Stories Are Told | | | Corporate ownership of creative works also diminishes the ability of the artist to tell her stories the way she would like. Television shows are broken into segments, each of which must end in a way that leaves the viewer both "wanting more" and in an emotional state that is receptive to whatever advertising he is about to see. Even though television writers labor with great care to make these artificial story developments seem organic, the viewer instinctively feels the falseness of what he's watching. | |
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< | One reason that critics praised HBO shows like "The Wire" and "The Sopranos" was that they "felt real." They didn't seem authentic because of the cursing or occasional topless woman. What made those shows feel "real" was that the stories moved at a pace and in a manner that was completely consistent with, and dictated by the characters and the world they inhabited. They were, in other words, art and just product. | >
> | One reason that critics praised HBO shows like "The Wire" and "The Sopranos" was that they "felt real." They didn't seem authentic because of the cursing or occasional topless woman. What made those shows feel "real" was that the stories moved at a pace and in a manner that was completely consistent with, and dictated by the characters and the world they inhabited. They were, in other words, art and not just product. | | | TOMORROW'S CREATIVE ARTIST |
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