A few weeks ago, a friend told me that he had wonderful new software that allowed him to download songs and the feds couldn’t catch him because it splintered the song into millions of tiny parts and then brought them back together as a song onto his computer–hard to trace. I tried to tell him that a) the feds would probably figure that software out eventually and b) he was stealing. I understand that the Free Culture movement would to argue that access to knowledge should be free. I quote from their manifesto:

“We will use and promote our cultural heritage in the public domain. We will make, share, adapt, and promote open content. We will listen to free music, look at free art, watch free film, and read free books. All the while, we will contribute, discuss, annotate, critique, improve, improvise, remix, mutate, and add yet more ingredients into the free culture soup.”

So…I’m an artist and I have to eat so I think it’s a thoroughly stupid movement. I agree with certain parts of it–the democratization and participatory nature of culture, knowledge, and art–but I’m also aware that it takes people years and years and years of study to master the skills needed or to participate well in producing knowledge and art. Of course, I haven’t read the book, and I may have to eat my words if it turns out to have more than a few good ideas in it.

I’m coming at this from one angle alone–the fact that art is a skill and that if there is no compensation for it, we will cease to have highly-skilled artists producing art (in whatever realm of art you can imagine.) Instead, we will have a lot of amateurs producing some good stuff, some great stuff, and a lot of horrible stuff. (Think YouTube. It’s fun–but is most of the stuff on there art?)

Okay, yes, they get my goat.

One could argue then that we could arrange a system whereby artists are paid by the government, so the people still pay for art with their taxes, and then all art could once again be free. I also think that idea is a real headache. How would we decide what art should be paid for and what art shouldn’t? Which artists should be subsidized and which shouldn’t? Should artists who take years to make something be subsidized during that entire time? And damn, it would be expensive! Taxes would go through the roof.

Well, yesterday when he turned on his computer and went to his super-duper software, whoopdidoo, guess what? A message from the feds: This site is illegally downloading songs and has been shut down. Of course, he panicked and hit his knees–probably hasn’t prayed in years but he prayed yesterday. So then we had a big discussion about why music shouldn’t just be free. He plays in a band and says he thinks all music should be free but he’s not trying to make a living off his music. I asked him how he would feel if he was trying to pay the rent and found out that a lot of people had downloaded his songs for free and it meant he couldn’t pay rent that month. That’s when he seemed to get what I was saying.