Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging...

Dean Gray's American Edit was a great little free release that mixed some Greenday songs with some non-Greenday songs.

Today, BoingBoing reports that the music industry has killed American Edit.

Okay. I kinda saw this coming. But it still hurts. The creative force behind American Edit wasn't making money at someone else's expense. He wasn't hurting sales of anyone else's product. No one was hurt. No one was deprived of anything. But the music industry disapproved. So this art must go.

Somewhere along the line, we lost track of things. The entire justification of copyright and patent law in the United States is, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," (Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution). I can't even remember the last time I heard of copyright law being used that way. And this case points out that what it's become isn't even "To ensure that the maker of something extracts the maximum possible money from it." Today, intellectual "property" law exists for one reason and one reason only: to suppress the creation of new art. The idea today is that you stake out a claim on an area of the noosphere and put a fence around it, stopping anyone else from using it. It's a notion that might make sense for resources that are exclusive (like land), but makes zero sense for an inexhaustible resource like thought. Could you imagine someone buying up all the air, and then denying it to anyone who couldn't pay (or, for that matter, denying it to people who could pay, but who the owner wanted dead for whatever reason)?

The whole point of copyright, in the beginning, was to ensure the existence of a creative commons -- that common pool of background thoughts and ideas which inspire new creation. Look at the patent. The point of the patent is not to stop other people from using your idea -- there's a much better way to do that. Guess what: the formula for Coca Cola isn't patented. The exclusivity that a patent grants is not its purpose: it's the reward. The decade head-start you get on your competitors is your payment for not keeping your invention a secret. The whole idea of a patent is that the government effectively "buys off" an inventor to release the full details of his new invention to the public by selling him a temporary monopoly.

And likewise, the whole point of copyright was to make it possible for an artist to make a living at art without the patronage system. See, back in the day, the way artists got paid was that they were hired by rich people to make some art. You didn't need copyright laws, because there was no money in copying existing art: the market for portraits of the Duke of Florence is pretty well exclusive to, well, the Duke of Florence himself. The idea behind copyright, again, was to ensure a creative commoms. It meant that, as an artist, I didn't have to wait for a commission to paint a painting. I could paint whatever I liked, and if the Duke happened to like it, he'd have to buy it from me, instead of hiring some other guy to make a copy of it (Of course, the money was probably better with a patron anyway, so long as you only intended to work when there was an interested patron nearby). With copyright, I could paint things that were not of immediate value to someone specific, and still make a living at it. Hence, more paintings get made, and everybody wins. And there's the key phrase: more paintings get made.

Copyright doesn't do that any more. In fact, what copyright does now is institutionalize a kind of "uberpatronage". Under the old system, the most a patron could do is not hire you. Now, the patron (read: the music industry) can go out and stop you from creating new stuff. We used to have a creative commons, and it used to get bigger as each artist added new material. It used to be about making the noosphere bigger. Now, it's about putting up walls and saying "this part of human experience belongs to us, and no one is allowed to expand it."

But read the BoingBoing article. It says most of the same things without the incoherence brought on by my annoyance.

For what it's worth, there are some folks who plan to protest the disappearance of American Edit by posting the albumb on-line en masse. I'm not participating, since I don't believe my disapproval of the system gives me license to break the law (Of course, not being a lawyer, I'm not actually sure this would even be illegal). But this certainly seems like as good a time as any to share your concerns over intellectual property laws with your local lawmaker.

By the way, if this article inspires you in some way, and you come up with your own thoughts using this as a starting point and want to print them somewhere.... As far as I'm concerned, that's a win for both of us. Go to it.