Intellectual Property Stupidity I

I have often held (and I am far from being in any way original in holding this) that Intellectual Property law is currently so restrictive in its conception of Fair Use that it restricts the cultural conversation. But as Lawrence Lessig points out in his discussion in the book Free Culture on the Supreme Court case Eldred v. Ashcroft, it is often difficult to prove the impact of so esoteric a concept to policymakers. "What's the real impact," they want to know.

Well if you want to know what cultural conversation looks like when it's restricted by IP law, you can't look for a better example than this: Don Hall has been posting reviews of his newest show, and writing short responses to them. The purpose is clear: he wants to create a dialog between himself and the critics for the general enlightenment of the public. Don Hall is very courteous in defending his work (although it is at times a teensie bit defensive, I'm okay with that, because it's the blog of a creator and certainly we don't want him not to stand behind his own work).

But under the interpretation of the law put out by one of the papers quoted, this is somehow infringing on their "property". I don't often get to use the word "horseshit" but things like this really burn my canoli.

Anyways, law aside, it is clear that Don Hall did nothing "wrong" -- he didn't systemically reprint any one publication's essays, he simply made a review of one of his own works public, along with some notes. As part of the conversation, it was an interesting strategy, a bold move. From the non-stupidity angle, I kind of liked that Don Hall does this, and I hoped that I'd see more playwright's doing something similar. I'd love to see some of the big titans of the industry posting responses to Brantley or Isherwood on their blogs. Provided that people can keep the tone of the conversation as courteous as Don's, it would be a welcome new avenue of keeping a show alive during and after its run.

Instead, people are going to look at Don Hall's example and say, "Oh dear. I don't want to be a criminal like him."

Stupid.

Grassroots + Power IV: Corruption

I promised I'd get back to my thoughts about the relationship between the grassroots and power, which I started here and continued here and here. The point of those posts were to debunk anonymous comments of an extremely negative tone related to my approval of the 9/11 Day of Service collaboration between Americans for the Arts and Serve.gov (and, extremely indirectly, the National Endowment of the Arts).

To get onto the subject, I saw an article about Disney and the New Orleans Museum of Art from Real Clear Arts that was really a good look at the relationship between artists and corporate entities. The article takes a stance against their upcoming exhibit on the art of Disney animation. The heart of the allegation is here:

According to The Times-Picayune, "Lella Smith, the creative director of Disney's Animation Research Library...selected the art for the exhibit..."

And that was because? NOMA has no curators? (I see several listed on the website.)

NOMA appears to have suspended any critical involvement in the presentation of the exhibit, meaning that it really is a Disney exhibit, physically located in a museum. Will NOMA profit by it? Probably.

It reminded me of Lawrence Lessig's lecture on corruption (which if you haven't seen it, is here). One of the core points in Lessig's lecture is that the appearance of corruption to an institution can be as damaging to the institution as the existence of corruption itself.

So, say for instance, NOMA agreed to allow a Disney executive to curate the exhibit because, I don't know, she's a former NOMA curator herself, and they have a relationship bond that assures them that even though she works for a for-profit company, she'll select the right art for NOMA's exhibit while also satisfying her job for Disney. NOMA could stand by that, insist that although the appearance is corrupt, it isn't. It wouldn't matter. NOMA is an organization for the community, presumably (the first phrase on their website is "Your New Orleans Museum of Art"), so if they're trading their legitimacy even on the belief that their exhibit will be better, they're eroding their ability to reach out to their own audience.

So back to the 9/11 Day of Service. Some questions about the impact of collaborating with Serve.gov about the nature of the collaboration:

1. To what degree does the government exert power over the grassroots? None at all. The government cannot force any decisions or choices on the grassroots organization.
2. To what degree does the grassroots organization suspend its critical faculty? None explicitly. No leadership positions are replaced or made subordinate to government leadership (as opposed to NOMA allowing Disney to curate). It may be that starry-eyed liberal artists swallow Obama administration lines because of their belief in Obama's propaganda, and thus are suspending their critical faculties, but that's either happening already or it's not going to happen. Certainly, liberals are capable of criticizing the president. Obviously others aren't. But that has nothing to do with the 9/11 Day of Service.
3. To what degree does the government influence the grassroots? Clearly, there is some minor degree of influence. The government is trying to maximize the impact of certain organizations it finds beneficial, and it will not exert that influence on organizations it doesn't want to be associated with. An artistic needle exchange project--I don't know, one that collects used needles from drug addicts for use in an art project and gives drug addicts clean needles--will probably not ever appear on Serve.gov. Then again, that project probably won't find much private support either. It sounds like a bad idea. In a way, the government is really only competing in the free market, albeit the free not-for-profit market. The tools it is using are tools that a private foundation could use: a small amount of resources, a cloak of legitimacy, centralized promotion. FringeNYC uses the same tools.
4. To what degree does the impression of corrupt influence exist? This is a much more complicated question, because it brings in the notion of an organization's audience. If your organization has a mission statement that says something like "Our purpose is to stand up to the power structures that be, to speak truth to power..." then you should not be working with Serve.gov. But then again, you probably wouldn't be, and no one will make you. Remember that the 9/11 Day of Service is in the more limited realm of artistic community service organizations. It is typically thoroughly expected that an artistic community service organization would be working with government leaders to help organize their efforts, because their mission statements are aligned and the above questions can be easily answered with satisfaction.
   
   Now, I have seen productions that have failed this. For instance, one of my favorite theater companies, Witness Relocation, did a Passover show with a sizable grant from a Jewish organization (I wanted to look up the details but it's not in the "Shows" section of their website). I saw the show, and my first impression was, "Wow, they made this show because they could get money for it." It didn't seem to me that they knew why they wanted to do a show about Passover. The show failed, and it took a little bit of its legitimacy away. If I hadn't seen the show right before that, Bluebird (which also is not on the "Shows" section of their website), I might have written them off has having little-to-no integrity. Bluebird was an excellent show, and it felt like it was needed--even though it too had a cultural grant behind it (if I remember the information correctly).

So what I'm realizing is that a corrupt power relationship between a grassroots organization and a power organization is where:

• The power organization (government or private) can exert power over the grassroots without the grassroots being able to defend against it
• The grassroots organization cedes critical faculty or self-control to the power organization
• The power organization exerts too much indirect influence over the grassroots organization
• The two organizations have dissonance in their missions and/or audiences

Obviously, corruption is a sliding scale, and not all of these elements have to be present for corruption to begin. But if you're about to collaborate with a power organization, then those are the four points you should test your relationship by.

How Copyright Hurts Playwrights II: Architecting

Copyright breaks my heart sometimes.

I went to P.S. 122 to see a show from a company who I'd seen before. They blew my mind. Their work was up to a new caliber. The show was Architecting, and after glowing reviews from Ben Brantley at the New York Times and anyone else you could ever imagine, it was extended. I saw the wreath of light around it, the excitement, and I noted that the reviews were not merely saying "good show." They were predicting this to be the new wave of American theater.

They were not wrong. The show captured something that is so incredibly difficult to capture. The company is called "Theater of the Emerging American Moment," and I have to say, they did exactly that. They captured the new American Moment. The one of my generation. The George W. Bush world, but in a way that spoke overtly about the present but tied itself into the historical past and the universal future. It spoke specifically about Hurricane Katrina but it was about destruction and rebuilding, about memorials, about destroyed communities. The ravaged South, the Hurricane country, the post-Suburban world.

What a shame that the whole thing was illegal.

Yes! Illegal theater! Banned theater! Theater which, under the law, is not to be done! I was even afraid to name the company involved, afraid to name the theater that is housing them, for fear that the lawyers will swoop in and crush them before the end of their run (February 15th--catch it before then!).

Now, I know what you're thinking. I went to the Czech Republic to hear stories of actually banned theater--Vaclav Havel's plays, or Belarus Free Theater. And of course, the people who are doing this theater have no fear of arrest. They won't find themselves on a 1930s era blacklist.

But it doesn't change that what these people are doing is illegal.

They're pirates. Copyright infringers. The people who make the RIAA sad. Because their work, which taps into historical American moments. Including an iconic historical book. Gone with the Wind.

Woah slow down, man! Did they pay for that Gone With The Wind? Did they get the approval of the estate of the writer?

Well, would the estate of the writer have granted it, even if TEAM had the money to option the stage rights? (any rights on one of America's most iconic classics are an arm and a leg--after all, a Broadway producer might be able to create a full run on Broadway with a classic adaptation of the play) Probably not. It has some very specific and harsh criticisms of the author, the book, the movie. Nothing slanderous, but... well, unless you're a very openminded individual (and not an estate of a dead individual), you might think twice about risking people taking away very strong messages against you.

But whatever the reason, this theater was illegal. It won't go into the historic canon, because there's a very low chance that it'll get published. Plays that only live in performance only live in the minds of the people that saw it, and in reviews that no one reads. Shakespeare is the first great English Playwright partly because he's the first published English Playwright. We remember him today because we still have his words.

This is why copyright breaks my heart. It is unfair that a book written about seventy years ago should force the most amazing play I've seen in the last year to be illegal. It simply breaks my heart.

I am reminded of something that Lawrence Lessig, one of my heroes, says (he's not the only one, and probably not the first, but I got it from him): we've criminalized a generation of kids. At the time, I thought he meant a generation in which music and movie piracy was the norm. But no. He's talking about the future artist/creators, who are growing up in an age where all of the artistic influence is already owned, where an entire century of American Experience is difficult to reference.

To talk about the southern experience without discussing Gone With The Wind would be as difficult as discussing American Government without discussing the Constitution. It's necessary for the cultural dialogue. That's why copyright should only last 7 years, or 7+7 if it's still profitable after the first 7. But 95 years? 95 + life? That's an entire century.

And as I discussed in the previous post, it drives this generation to look further into the past, to try and renovate the old plays--like the illegal theaters of Eastern Europe performing works of Shakespeare because the Bard gave cover for rebellious theater (read Dogg's Hamlet/Cahout's Macbeth by Tom Stoppard to see what I mean). Or they simply break the law, like TEAM did, like I have done in my theater.

And, being illegal, they may vanish forever rather than be preserved. It breaks my heart.

Politics: Lawrence Lessig + Change Congress

Earlier this week, I was uplifted and excited to hear news that one of the men I most respect in the public sphere, Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a Stanford Law Professor, and though fairly young has achieved a certain level of internet fame. He has published a few books, mostly around his idea of Free Culture.

As a Stanford Constitutional law professor, his main area of focus seemed to be how our law system is being transformed by the Internet--not surprising for a young law scholar, because that's the new frontier of our society. Once there, his attention was drawn to Intellectual Property law--which he believes is currently highly onerous, and I tend to agree in fairly strong terms. Finding inspiration in folks like Richard Stallman (who in 1983 started the GNU Project, which fostered Linux) who believed that intellectual property could survive without extreme protections (like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, or the DMCA), Lessig began a series of lectures and books to examine the issues of free culture. This led him to co-found the Creative Commons, which offers an alternative to copyright.

People like Stallman and Lessig have at this point been tagged as the 'copyleft' movement, because of their progressive alternatives to copyright. As an artist, Lessig is more important to me than Stallman (The Creative Commons caters mostly to artists and academics; GNU Project is a programmer's venture). The show I am currently working on would be far more expensive if I had to pay each individual rights; I am not 'stealing' anyone's work, but I would still probably be charged thousands of dollars. The ability to share and create works based on old works is part of the lifeblood of me and artists like me; it is the corporate world which objects to this, for the most part.

But starting from the end of last year, Lessig made a shift that was surprising to people like me who aren't very close to him personally: he decided to leave the copyleft movement in favor of an anti-corruption movement which had not yet formed. He created an anti-corruption wiki (which was an engaging concept: politics by wiki), and started to stump for Barack Obama. Outside of the internet world, he's not a very widely known academic, so it didn't make that much of an impact.

This week, it looked like that was about to change. In Lessig's home district (CA 12), US Representative Tom Lantos died, and a special election was brewing. Lessig formed an exploratory committee to explore launching the Change Congress movement (the name of the anti-corruption movement now).

My reaction was, on the whole positive. I'm still highly positive for that idea, although I don't live in CA12. Why?

• Lessig is a knowledgable Constitutional Law professor, who has argued cases before the Supreme Court.
• Lessig was portrayed by Christopher Lloyd on the West Wing. (That's not a real reason, but it's cool).
• Lessig is one of the few people who I know of in the political sphere who have ever even given thought to Intellectual Property. You don't hear anyone talking about it, you don't see it anywhere. There's a massive copyright lobby, but the copyleft lobby is still in its infancy; new organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are still in their infancy.
• Lessig wants to create a progressivist movement, which I think this country badly needs; Barack Obama's current traction and the 'change' buzzword are indicators of this.
• Lessig is one of the few 'change' people out there who has fully articulated that real 'change' transcends the individual issues; the ways in which issues are resolved have to be tackled.

This is why I would have loved to see a Lessig '08 and even though he wouldn't have represented me, I would have donated for him.

Unfortunately, a few days later, he was already posting that he was not going to run. His reasoning, although saddening, was sound: he wasn't going to win. The opponent in the Democratic primary, Jackie Speier (although I don't know her) is apparently a very popular, very well respected, very experienced Democrat. Although I also think Lessig would do a good job, there doesn't appear to be a chance that Lessig would unseat Speier, and he would wind up hurting Change Congress.

The important thing, however, is that the Change Congress movement is still out there. Nine months away from the election--Change Congress could have a baby by then. A baby of democracy, I suppose. This is the movement we need, a progressive answer to the Republican Revolution of 1996. But we need to know more; the website, currently, is just a mailing list signup. I want to know where Lessig is going with this movement. How do they want to change Congress? How are they going to tackle nonprocedural issues?

I'm dying to know. And I hope I'll soon find out.