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Audience v. artist: Write the

2 comments on Audience v. artist: Write the

Audience v. artist
: Write the Web interviews Noah Grey, the creator of Greymatter (the predecessor to Movable Type), who runs a photo site. He made Greymatter open but he owns his photos and doesn’t want to see them stolen, so they asked him about the current copyright contretemps:

I’m mystified and slightly angered by the growing feeling among many on the web that the rights of artists over their own work just aren’t important (or are at least of equal importance to the user’s desire to do whatever they want with it). I think I understand and appreciate the value of openness as well as anyone – Greymatter is one of the most well-known opensource programs in the world, after all (and in fact I’ve now put it under a Creative Commons license).

The ethic of openness and sharing is a great one, but somehow that got mutated in a lot of people’s minds into the idea that it should be the users deciding what’s open, and not the artists.

[via Industrial Technology & Witchcraft]

2 responses to “Audience v. artist: Write the”

  1. Dean Esmay Avatar
    Dean Esmay

    It’s hard for people who are doing something that they don’t make any money at to think that they owe someone else money for using their stuff.
    It’s one of those issues that will never entirely go away, I think. People understand property, but intellectual property is very fuzzy with most folks. I think they instinctively understand that if you want to charge money for something, then you probably owe the creator something. But if you’re just passing something around for free…? I mean, isn’t that what libraries do?
    I don’t think people will ever understand instinctively that copying intellectual property is stealing. The law will always be fighting this.

  2. Andrea Harris Avatar
    Andrea Harris

    Well, you’re allowed to borrow a library book, but not to photocopy all the pages and replace the writer’s name with your own and sell it — or even to copy it and keep for yourself. (Schools can copy pages for educational purposes, but there are limits.) I don’t really see how difficult it is to grasp the concept of: “I did not take this photo/write this essay, so I have no right to tell the photographer/essayist what to do with it.” But I guess everybody wants to ride, nobody wants to pay.