There was a very dirty car parked outside my building today. I wrote “my finger is dirty” on it with my finger.

Through a convoluted internal thought process this led me to consider art and the protection of intellectual property, i.e. copyright and the patent system. It used to be that artistic and technical innovations were public domain. There are no physical, moral, or other penalties involved with using someone else’s clever idea. The originators of irrigation technology and trigonometry would have accepted that their work would help farming universally. Credit may or may not be given to them. Similarly, the originators (the word “authors” implies authority and ownership) of popular poetry and music released material to their societies through performance. Other performers further diffused the material subsequently. After many degrees of separation from the originator, the melody, poetry, technique, or invention would still be used and recognised for its own integral qualities. Furthermore, alterations and improvements would be made to art and technique along the way.

The current situation is one where inventors and authors claim ownership not just of the original, but every subsequent use of their idea. In the technical world this has led to a much criticised patent system where a company can essentially get away with patenting the use of money. In the world of art, record companies not only forbid other artists from using somebody else’s melody, but severly limit the audience’s rights to listening to music. And not only is music now something that one has to buy, but recent “copy protection” measures impede the use of purchased recorded music on some playback devices.

These restrictions in the use and diffusion of what is essentially information are the antipode of the facilities for cheap mass broadcast offered by the internet. There have been attempts at open-sourcing new content, but they are few and far between.

Of course, maintaining information propriety is beneficial to authors and distributors. Distributors function merely as middle parties. Middle parties are useful in other fields, so if all intellectual property suddenly became public domain distributors would just need to repurpose their services. However, the authors themselves would receive significantly smaller financial rewards for their work. Still, their originating skills would remain valuable, and offer them an advantage over the recepients of their work. Technical innovators’ skills would be used more efficiently if they operated in a consulting capacity. Artists would be forced to produce more work and of higher quality. And the remarketing of existing ideas would lead to improvements, adjustments, and adaptations.

Incidentally, Raphael analyses the moral implications of his involvment in the socioeconomical web in his Mayday essay called Disgust. And he seems to have something to say about art, too.