Until then, why not make sure you’ve caught up on all the best stories from December, and from 2013 in general.
If you haven’t checked them out yet, you’re welcome to try:
Some of us are concerned, and perhaps rightly so, about the ability of artists to create new culture by freely building on the culture that came before. To this effect, some of us have taken to advocating for the idea that looser copyright restrictions are necessary in order to facilitate freedom of art in the internet age.
This all sounds very good, but is there any substance to it? After years of studying the issue, I’ve become less and less certain that there is.
For more than 200 years, our country has dealt with so many of the same questions that have re-surfaced in the internet age. And we’ve addressed them through both legal and cultural means. Today, the principles that lie beneath these issues have not really changed much at all. Only the formats have.
Back in the 1700s, even Thomas Jefferson, proto-“libertarian” if there ever was one, conceded that intellectual property creates far more liberty than it destroys.
In the music world, it turns out that there are already great solutions in place for both “sampling” and “cover songs”, especially on the commercial level. For instance, no one can ever refuse you the right to record a cover song, or even to commercially distribute it.
If you do release your cover song commercially, you owe the songwriter a small cut. That’s it. And to stop ad execs and movie producers from exploiting songwriters with their own hired guns, the writer of a song must sign off on any use of her song in a film, TV show or advertisement — whether it’s a cover or not.
Pretty reasonable, right?
In the case of commercial sampling, there is again a working system in place: Musicians and their managers essentially negotiate their own terms with one another for any significant use of direct sample. This is a bit more complex and open-ended than the laws around cover songs are, but it did not stop, say, the entire rich history of hip hop, commercial remix culture or electronic music from happening.
(And yes, sound-alikes and imitations are allowed in almost all cases of sampling. Straight up jacking someone else’s expensive-to-make recordings without cutting them in on your earnings, isn’t.)
Music is not the only place where we’ve come up with inventive solutions that still work well on the web, so long as we simply enforce them.
We already have generous exemptions for “satire” and “parody” in the case of film and writing, and we have broad fair use protections covering scholarship, criticism and reporting. And of course, whether it comes to music or storytelling, “similarity” is not theft. Only outright direct theft, is theft.
But at this point, someone will often raise a valid question that occurs to me regularly as well: “What about non-commercial uses?”
That’s an important distinction to make. And to me, it merely begs a further set of questions:
There have been times in history when refinement has been necessary. I personally applaud the work done in establishing Creative Commons, which I have used extensively in the past. It’s is an alternative form of copyright for those who are unconcerned with making a living from their creations, and wish to opt out of traditional copyright protections.
But the success of this new alternative has only helped to make an even stronger case for why traditional copyright is perhaps better than ever and should also be preserved. There was something missing, and it simply got added.
Although I was once sympathetic to the idea that loosening some IP restrictions might benefit artists, the more these debates ring out in public, the more I’ve come to understand that there is tremendous validity to most of the current norms of copyright law, even in the internet era. I’m still waiting for an ultimately convincing argument to suggest that any one feature ought to be replaced or done away with.
By this point, it has become very clear that it is by no means too much copyright that has led to the troublesome issues in sustainability faced by the art and music worlds today. The problem of course, has been far too little enforcement of the good laws that we already have on the books. For the most part, they are reasonable and well-considered ones, even if any one person or lawsuit is not. Such is life.
Even though the advantages of strong copyright protections for individual creators have become increasingly clear in the internet age, I’ve remained sympathetic to arguments that perhaps our copyright periods last too long.
It’s easy to admit that at first glance, 70 years does seem a like a bit of a long time. But whenever I start to think about it further, I start to wonder… Is it really?
Most of us would probably agree that artists should have some commercial control over their work within their lifetimes.
If you write a song at age 18, should BMW be allowed to use it in a TV commercial without your consent, and without payment, when you’re 88? Is it perhaps, right for a creative copyright term to last as long as the creator does herself? I think so.
From here, we might naturally start to wonder about the next generation. After all, one of the biggest reasons people aim high within their own lifetimes is to leave a better future for their children, and to create works that might outlive themselves, and prove valuable to future generations. To keep these worthy incentives going, does it not make sense to allow copyright terms to extend into the lives of the artists heirs if they so choose?
If you write a song at age 18, should BMW be able to snatch it up for one of their advertisements, without your consent and without payment, because you happen to die tragically at age 28 or 38? Should it suddenly become fair game for any record label or online distributor to capitalize on your work without paying royalties to your grieving family? What if the enduring value of your hard work is something that your family had been planning on to help support them for the long term?
So, how long should copyright terms be, exactly? I don’t know. Any concrete legal decision is likely to be somewhat arbitrary in the end. But they must be based on principles in order to be just.
It seems reasonable to demand that creative copyright should last for at least the lifetime of the creator. This would allow us to prevent any unwanted and non-consensual commercial exploitation of living artists. It also seems reasonable to demand that copyright protections last for at least some portion of the life of the creator’s immediate heirs. And it seems expedient that there should be some minimum length for the term.
The details of course, we can quibble over. But I think that these are basic principles we should all be able to agree on. They are principles worth fighting for.
Of course, there are caveats and concerns and finer points to be raised: Should we require rightsholders to start renewing their copyrights after a certain time period in order to retain commercial control over them? Or would that kind of requirement merely be an unfair disadvantage to smaller and less organized rightsholders?
Should active companies have to give up their control over trademark characters like Mickey Mouse, The Cat In The Hat or Buzz Lightyear after a certain period, or should we finally say once and for all that they should be allowed to keep their branded characters their own indefinitely, so long as they keep on using them?
It’s an important issue to raise, because so many anti-IP activists will contend that copyright is “only so long because Disney is greedy.” I’m not convinced. (No, Disney doesn’t pay me anything to say this, and I have never worked for them, nor do I aspire to.) I am merely committed to thinking these questions through as far as they will go: Wouldn’t continued commercial control over old characters simply inspire the rest of us to create new ones? Isn’t that half the point of copyright to begin with?
From what I remember, the existence of Marvel and DC trademarks were of no threat to the creation of a truly seminal and innovative graphic novel like The Watchmen. Don’t arrangements like this merely incentivize companies to invest in new creators and new creative works, perhaps even hoping that they might strike upon a new creation that endures?
Recently, I read a blog post from a Duke University professor who laments that “Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2053“, for works such as On The Road, From Russia With Love, Funny Face, Atlas Shrugged and The Cat In The Hat to enter the public domain. But he never seems to fully explain to my satisfaction: Wait for what?
I am currently able to access any of these titles cheaply through an online bookstore, legal streaming or rental service, or for free via my local public library. So I’m just not sure what I’m missing.
Although I’m sympathetic to concerns over the availability of “orphan works”, I am also fearful of that term being misused to strip initially unsuccessful creators of their rights. I am also curious to hear the reasoning behind why companies shouldn’t be allowed to keep trademarks on long-term brand characters like Mickey Mouse or The Cat In The Hat.
On what principle would we come to that decision? How does this practice actually cause harm? And, have we fully thought through the potentially greater harm that might come from ending it?
At first I can sympathize with calls to weaken some aspects of copyright. But when I think it through, I increasingly begin to see the benefits of IP protections, and the shortsightedness of stripping creators of their rights, and investors of their incentives.
If you’re hanging out with the rights sorts of people, I won’t be the only one to suggest that your goals aren’t the thing to focus on for the new year. Your habits matter a lot more.
Of course, your goals are important. Set them. Make your near-term goals modest and achievable, and they can serve as welcome milestones or breathing spots along the road. If you make reasonable goals for the short term, they can be much more empowering than overwhelming. (And if in the back of your head, you dream big for the long term, you might just find the motivation to keep on going.)
But goals are not everything: “Lose 25 pounds.” “Eat more vegetables.” “Go to the gym more.” “Run a mile in under 7 minutes.” “Release our biggest album yet.””Sell X copies.” Whether specific or vague, none of this addresses the how. What new habits will you adopt? What new systems will you have in place?
Take a simple resolution, something many of us have addressed at some point in our lives: “Stop biting my nails.” That seems like a perfectly specific goal. But it is simply a goal to stop a habit that you already have. This is nearly impossible.
Think instead of what new habit you’d like to adopt in its place: “Start filing or trimming nails once every week.” Make this new habit your goal. Better yet, make your plan to adopt this goal even more specific, and turn it into a “system.” You might say: “Trim nails once each weekend.” Or better yet: “Trim nails Mondays after showering.”
When I was finally able to quite smoking cigarettes after 15 years, it was because I chose a somewhat better, healthier habit to replace it with: Smoking a large tobacco pipe once, no more than twice, each day.
I did this for one full year until it became incompatible with my next new habit: Riding a bike instead of taking the subway whenever the bike would be faster. (It turns out that in New York City, this is almost always.)
Similarly, goals like “eat better”, “lose ten pounds” or “go on a diet” don’t tend to work on their own. These are vague and insipid mandates. What are the new habits and systems you’ll adopt? “Eat beans or lentils whenever I would normally think to eat bread, potatoes, pasta or rice” is the kind of thing that does work instead.
(This what I tried after seeing myself in my first video series and realizing that I developed a little bit of a paunch. With this method, I had essentially lost it within a few weeks.)
This year, one of my goals has been to quit wasting so much time on Facebook, focus on more fulfilling creative outlets, and start seeing friends in real life more often. But again, these vague goals aren’t worth much on their own.
Instead, I gave myself new habits to keep. You’re witnessing one of them right now: “Write one blog post each day instead of writing on Facebook.”
(Incidentally, that’s another little trick that helps: Make your resolution known to others. Then you’ll really have something at stake.)
You might also have noticed that I jumped the gun on this particular resolution by beginning it over a week ago. That’s another tactic that can help: You don’t need to wait for a special occasion to make a change. “Now” is always the best time.
You can apply this kind of thinking to anything: Practicing, producing, promotion, expanding your network, or exposing yourself to more inspiring culture. You might end up changing a lot more for the better than you ever reasonably expected.
Just be sure to take on these new habits no more than one or two at a time. Depending on who you ask, it may take anywhere from 20 to 90 days to form a new habit to the point at which it becomes effortless and automatic.
Rest assured, given time and application, the new habits will form. The question is: Which ones to choose? And, are you willing to commit to change? That part is up to you.
Whether we’d like to believe it or not, we are creatures of habit. So pick yours, or you might just find yourself living a life full of habits that you never actually chose.
One of my several favorite albums of 2013 has been Luke Temple’s Good Mood Fool, which at times, sounds a bit like Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon if I actually liked Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon. (Maybe I’m turning old. I’ll have to listen to some Wipers this month as penance.)
The way I consumed Good Mood Fool was by listening to it about 10 times in its entirety on Spotify. At my age, when I really like something, that’s about enough for me. For this privilege, I paid $0, and was barely subject to any advertising that I can remember.
Since I use the free version of Spotify, Luke Temple’s label would have earned, optimistically, about 50 cents from this transaction. Assuming that his label, Secretly Canadian, takes half of this, Temple himself stands to earn about 25 cents for making an album I really enjoyed and spent several hours of my life listening to. But here’s the thing: I would have been willing to pay more. The only problem is that nobody asked me to.
Had I been cut off after hearing this album 4 times, and was asked to pony up $5-$10 to unlock unlimited plays, I would have done it. If I was only able to listen to 3 or 4 tracks and had to pay $5-$10 to unlock the rest, I would have done it. If I had to upgrade to the premium service, which pays out a higher rate to the artist, I would have done it.
But no one asked me to do any of these things. So here I am, listening to music in the format I always dreamed of as a kid: With the ability to pull up any of the world’s music instantly and in high quality, and I am paying $0 out of my pocket for it. I’m not even subjected to nearly enough advertisements for me to be aware that there are advertisements.
So please remember: I am happy to give you more money. But you have to ask. And you have to give me a reason to. (“Pay more so that you’ll hear zero ads” instead of “essentially zero ads” does not count as a “reason.”)
Whenever you are doing things for others that they appreciate, you are worth something to them. Remember that. Ask me to pay you more. And give me a good reason to do it.
(The things people say on Facebook should be among them.)
Beginning Jan 1, 2014, I’ll have a new social media policy:
Although my Facebook account will remain open, I’ll only be using it for broadcasting new articles and blog posts, and for private email correspondence. Twitter will also become a posting and listening station only.
Don’t worry: I’m still here. I’ll just be reducing wasted hours in an effort to get more work done, and see more people in-person where we can have even fuller and more satisfying chats. Hopefully, some of them can be with you.
If you have a comment or a question you’d like an answer to, please send me a note or give a call anytime, since I will no longer be participating in comment threads.
It’s been fun at times to discuss ideas at length online, and social media sites offer great opportunities to hash through complex subjects with people you’d be unlikely to ever meet out in the real world.
I’ve seen these kinds of dialogues go surprisingly cordially and well, and have participated in conversations that have left me feeling incredibly fond of people I don’t fully agree with in all cases.
I’ve also participated in conversations filled with such deliberate venom, willful tone-deafnesses, and a knee- jerk readiness to take offense. I’ve witnessed remarkable unwillingness to hear out and reasonably consider alternate perspectives, or to integrate relevant new facts into a discussion.
Of course, I’ve been guilty of the same things myself. Hopefully, less and less so as time goes on.
I’d like to think that I’m far from the worst in this. (Don’t we all?) But I also know that believing that too sincerely is the path to being just plain dreadful about it.
Ultimately, I just can’t keep on engaging via Facebook. I’m not cut out for it. My instinct is to hear out and consider every argument, and to respond in painstaking detail whenever I can.
This ends up taking many more hours out of my weeks than I’d like to admit.
These are hours that I’d much rather spend learning Spanish, playing the piano, writing real articles that I get paid for, reading books, taking MOOCs in whatever new subject catches my interest, making new business contacts, and conversing one-on-one with the people I care about most.
So dear friends: If I don’t engage with you in Facebook threads come January 1st, please know that you can reach me easily via email or phone, or catch up with me anytime on this new daily blog. It should be pretty good most of the time.
Thanks for listening, and I hope to see you around.
There is no doubt that New York City is expensive. It is one of the most expensive cities in America, right alongside San Francisco.
One things that these two cities share in common is that they have among the most tightly controlled housing markets in the country, and we consistently refuse to build enough housing to keep up with demand. So for better and for worse, these are cities that are expensive by design.
Even our “affordable housing” policies conspire to make these cities more expensive on the whole, rather than less. History has repeatedly shown that when you answer housing shortages with price controls, you get more shortages and higher prices for most people. This is not news. It is a persistent feature of reality that college students go over in week one of basic economics. (Unfortunately far too many of us, myself included, are never confronted with these fundamental realities of life until we are long into adulthood.)
Still, expensive cities like these can be great if you can afford to live in one. They will often offer incredible public services, competitive arts scenes and vibrant economies. Of course, they can also be pretty terrible to live in if you can’t afford them, perhaps most especially from the perspective of basic sanity. They can and will chew you up and spit you out, and given the chance, they are more than happy to impose their own formidable will on top of your own.
For those of us who have more time and creativity to offer than money, there are often amazing benefits to living in less expensive and less saturated cities. There are incredible advantages to living in places like Philadelphia, Austin, Providence, Chicago, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Louisville, Lexington, Portland, Hudson, Houston, Milwaukee, Asheville, Athens and so many others around this amazingly diverse country.
Some of those who currently live in New York find the very thought of even considering these cities offensive. But I believe that this attitude is itself an insult, not only to the people who live in those great cities, but also to other current New York residents considering similar moves for themselves.
Since the very beginning, human beings have always been moving from one place to another, because opportunities have always been on the move ahead of them. The 21st century is no different in that regard. The kinds of opportunities offered by the New York of 10, 20 and 30 years ago are still around. That they have simply shifted elsewhere should be of no surprise to us.
What so many of us tend to forget is that the romanticized “affordable” New York of the 1970s and 1980s was nothing like the New York of today. Instead, it was a whole lot like the Detroit of today: High crime, crumbling infrastructure, looming bankruptcy, and few jobs or opportunity for immediate return on investment. If one wants those kinds of opportunities, one must be willing to pay that kind of price.
With a few exceptions, today’s New York offers new kinds of opportunity to new kinds of people:
Some of them are recent arrivals to this city who bring talent and resources from around the world into our local and national economies. Many of them are longtime residents who themselves have been “gentrified”, developing new skills, making smart investments, and adapting to the changing times. And many more are those who have returned to this city after a generation in which they were pushed out due to increasing crime, crumbling infrastructure and poor civic planning.
Today, what remains the best way for artists and regular working people to get long-term affordable housing in any city is to save up, buy something that is worth more to you than it is to others, and then sit on it, improving the local world around you until others realize just how foolish they’ve been for not realizing how good you’ve got it. This is not rocket science. People far less “intelligent” than you are doing this kind of thing every day.
When artists and regular working people like us get involved in their cities in this way, as our neighborhoods improve and our property values go up, we benefit. And, unlike with a rental, no one can ask us to leave if it turns out that they can get more for the that place they’re allowing us to stay in than we can afford to pay them.
Still, many of us believe that we all would benefit from having far more affordable rents in this city for those of us who are not ready, willing, or interested in buying a place to live. And I agree. With that in mind, there are two surefire ways to make housing far more affordable without adding any more of the ill-advised price controls that have proven to be counter-productive, even destructive, in the long run. They are:
1) Build enough housing to keep up with demand.
If you overdo this, you get really inexpensive housing, much like in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, or Las Vegas a few years ago, when brand new homes routinely rented for less than the cost of their mortgages.
2) Pay people enough money through their jobs so that they can afford where they live.
This requires rolling back both direct and indirect subsidies that allow companies to pay their workers far too little for their area, with the comfortable expectation that other taxpayers, homeowners and renters will foot the bill for them.
There is of course, one more way to make a city more affordable: You can make it a less desirable place to live for people at every income level. (ie “crappier.”)
As stupid as this sounds when you say it out loud, it is far too common of a choice. Despite the best of intentions, this is the approach we inadvertently took in leading to the New York of the 70s and 80s. And it worked: People who could afford to leave the city did so in droves. Those who couldn’t afford to leave were stuck with crumbling infrastructure, disappearing opportunity, rising crime, and a general erosion in their quality of life. That’s one way to do it.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to live in an affordable city. An affordable city is simply one where your income allows you to do the things you care about most without you having a heart attack at age 40. This can happen at any price and any income level. And it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
One person might get a lot more creative work done if he doesn’t have to go insane worrying about rent all the damn time. Another might find the pressure of living in an especially competitive city, having to make ends meet by living up to totally crazy demands quite invigorating and inspiring. That is a choice.
To each their own. No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head, forcing them to live in cities like New York or San Francisco. There’s also no law that says you can’t make great art in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philly or Cleveland. You might just have to generate more of it yourself. Though, for an artist or musician, isn’t that kind of the whole point?
Ultimately, not every place in the world has to be like New York. All I’d ask is that we allow New York to be like New York. And that in our well-intentioned zeal for fairness and affordability, we do not mistake it for someplace else.
Flying in a plane, it’s hard not to recognize that you’re part of something larger than yourself.
It’s not only the trust you must put into the hundreds of people who played their role in making you airborne — from the pilots, engineers and machinists, to the traffic controllers, maintenance crews and ticket sellers — It is the clear-eyed view that you suddenly get of your everyday environment.
As you climb in altitude, the relentless immediacy of the world around you fades. It first recedes into an unconvincing Fred Rogers model town. Then, with greater distance, into a living, breathing super-organism, something like a probiotic culture left to grow in a jar of milk.
From so many feet up, you see snaking highways, winding roads, gridded streets, and the constant movement of thousands of people, each of them pursuing their independent interests, often unaware of their countless connections to the others around them.
Zoom in on any one of these individuals and you have a whole person, complete with feelings, drives and biases so much like your own. Their tastes and priorities, interests and goals, backgrounds and means may differ greatly, and this is reflected in the tremendous diversity you witness on the ground below.
You see a man-made pool below you, huge and rectangular, the color of the inside of a lime, glowing with the near-fluorescent intensity of a deep sea algae bloom, and you wonder at it.
It is rock quarry, and you realize that someone in this world became so interested in rocks, saw such poetry and practicality in rocks, that he decided to do this, and to get hundreds of others involved.
Flying over another city, you see similar pools, this time curving in the shape of nature, some a burnt orange, some a startling hot magenta. They are salt evaporation ponds, and some small group of people saw such impossible beauty and usefulness in salt that they brought so many other human beings together to make these unforgettable and unpretentious triumphs.
Off in the distant horizon, there is gentle white smoke billowing from what must be a power plant. It seems to burn cleaner, more timidly and with fewer stacks than you ever remembered. In the foreground, there is a smattering of proud little wind turbines, and monolithic black slats turned on their sides, soaking power from the sun.
Over your life, you have seen even the character of the streetlights change: Once a dreary and doleful orange, struggling with grimy resilience to scare away the night; now slowly supplanted by bright-eyed blueish-white bulbs, ebulliently challenging the sun.
These are everyday triumphs, mundane miracles that care little whether you notice them. They just keep on being crucial to our lives, regardless of what we acknowledge and what we distract ourselves by.
It has been said that it is the job of the artist to make magic of the mundane.
If that is true, then the world seems at times, to be filled with artists. Sometimes, they simply forget that they are.
If you aspire to be a professional artist, then you must be able to zoom out 30,000 feet, and zoom back in, right on top of and inside of any one of those individuals below. You must be able to see them from each of these angles and tell them the story of themselves.
You can do this with words or with notes, with a single image or an ongoing chain of them. But you must do it.
You must make their story your own, and your story, theirs. You must tell them what you see, and help them see themselves.
The flip side of free speech is that there is no government board that will keep your gate for you. It’s our own responsibility to make sure we’re steeped in more good ideas than bad ones.
Although the best antidote to bad speech is better speech, it doesn’t mean you have to hear out every awful idea, rebut every faulty argument, wade deep into every cesspool and try to clean it out.
The same is true of art. In our worst moods, so many of us focus on what music we dislike, how the good stuff doesn’t get a fair shake, how apparently, no one but us cares enough about what really matters, or supports what’s really important.
Of course, every moment we spend complaining about what other people are doing wrong is a moment we are not spending in support of what’s really important. It’s a moment that we’re not appreciating or creating or advancing better alternatives. It’s a moment spent being what we wouldn’t want to become.
Bad speech is an invitation for listening, for compassion, for understanding, for better arguments and for better speech.
When we hear hateful speech, our goal should be to help stop our fellow human beings from feeling such hatred. Not to get them to simply stop talking about it whenever we can hear them.
This is difficult to do. But it is worth trying.
This approach of “trying to understand people” also helps us realize when we are ascribing to others hateful intents and beliefs that they do not actually hold. (We do this far more often than we may realize.)
And, it helps us figure out when the thing that someone claims to be mad about is not actually the thing that is actually causing them distress. (Which is often.)
Sometimes, what we hear incorrectly as “hate” might merely be ignorance, inelegance, tactlessness, closed mindedness, frustration, or simply, an opinionated difference in values.
But either way, the only antidote to bad speech is more and better speech. Not more anger and aggression and suppression.
Even when they are the worst ones imaginable, words are only words. It is almost always wiser to judge a man based on what he does, rather than on what he says.
This can also be harder to do than it is to say. Just like a lot of things.