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KateVershov-FirstPaper 3 - 14 Feb 2008 - Main.KateVershov
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| | | The Dangers of Economic Rhetoric
The problem is that the RIAA is not just seeking restitution and damages for the artists they represent. Frighteningly, it is insidiously propagating a particular world view where the distinction between commodity and culture becomes blurred. Marx’s commodity fetishism conceptualized workers’ alienation from social interaction, identity, and their own activity as the result of producing objects that became market commodities. Communism aside, Marx’s fears have been borne. Consider Richard Posner, who concludes that “’the prevention of rape is essential to protect the marriage market…and more generally to secure property rights in women’s persons’” as if bodily integrity were a fungible object. The danger of this sort of rhetoric is clear, yet the same sort of apprehension should also accompany the language of the RIAA. In both cases, commoditization is perilous because it attempts to encapsulate concepts in economic terms whose values are inherently rooted in so much more than just market price. | |
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< | Artists should certainly be compensated for their work. However, copyright law was designed “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not just to decide who gets a cut of profits when. In considering copyright reform, the economic analysis must be just one of many frameworks employed in order to fulfill the Framers’ goal for copyright law. Questions about how to maintain a creative commons deep enough from which other artists can seek inspiration, the best way for listeners to interact with music, how to define new art media and what value to assign them cannot be answered by economists alone. A consilient understanding of copyright law must begin by laying aside economic rhetoric and examining other approaches. Failing to do so, considerations of free speech, information access, and a public domain will find no forum in this debate. Without breaking free of a single framework, there can be no radical vision for a better future. | >
> | Artists should certainly be compensated for their work. However, copyright law was designed “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not just to decide who gets a cut of profits when. In considering copyright reform, the economic analysis must be just one of many frameworks employed in order to fulfill the Framers’ goal for copyright law. Questions about how to maintain a creative commons deep enough from which other artists can seek inspiration, the best way for listeners to interact with music, how to define new art media and what value to assign them cannot be answered by economists alone. A consilient understanding of copyright law must begin by laying aside economic rhetoric and examining other approaches. Failing to do so, considerations of free speech, information access, and a public domain will find no forum in this debate. Without breaking free of a single framework, there can be no radical vision for a better future. | | | Conclusion
Without acknowledging a framework beyond economics, the rhetoric of the music industry will prevail and copyright reform will be stalled indefinitely. |
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