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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. | | | 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) | |
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< | 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. | >
> | Today, the entertainment behemoths are still crucial to actually being on 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 with accessible equipment. 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. | | | 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. | | | 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 not just product. | >
> | "The Wire" and "The Sopranos" didn't feel "real" because of the cursing or occasional topless woman. What made those shows seem authentic 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 | | | In homes all over America there are men and women with a digital video camera and a story to tell. For most of these people, widespread acclaim for their work will never arrive. Perhaps their story won't strike a nerve with viewers, perhaps they lack the ability to relate their story in an interesting manner. Some of them, though, will produce art that we will want to see. But there's a good chance that we never will, and that would be a tremendous loss. | |
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< | As Matt Stone alludes to, the most important ingredient in determining the success of a television show is that it be seen. The Internet would seem to provide the opportunity for a young video artist to stand up and shout "Here's what I can do!" The problem is that the artist must somehow make herself heard around the endless advertising on every bus, subway, television and computer screen, cajoling us to watch the latest remake of an old show starring that actress we sort of liked in that other thing, advertising that is financed by the copyrights held by a handful of companies and so rigorously defended by our government. Whether we would rather see that remake instead of something small, personal and amateur is unimportant. What is clear is that we should be rooting for that young video artist to succeed, not helping five enormous corporations make ever greater profits so that one day, if that artist does make his voice heard, they can force him to cede his copyright to them, call it "work for hire" and start revving up the Emmy campaign. The video artist's fight is, after all, a true David versus Goliath story: the kind of story that we love to watch on TV. | >
> | As Matt Stone alludes to, the most important ingredient in determining the success of a television show is that it be seen. The Internet would seem to provide the opportunity for a young video artist to stand up and shout "Here's what I can do!" The problem is that the artist must somehow make herself heard around the endless advertising on every bus, subway and computer screen, cajoling us to watch the latest remake of an old show starring that actress we sort of liked in that other thing, advertising that is financed by the copyrights held by a handful of companies and rigorously defended by our government. Whether we would rather see that remake instead of something small, personal and amateur is unimportant. What is clear is that we should be rooting for that video artist to succeed, not helping five corporations make ever greater profits so that one day, if that artist does make his voice heard, they can force him to cede his copyright to them, call it "work for hire" and start revving up the Emmy campaign. That video artist's fight is, after all, a true David versus Goliath story: the kind of story that we love to watch on TV. | | |
-- By JohnSchwab - 11 Apr 2010 |
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