Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Artist Copyright

I have been thinking a bit lately about copyright. Specifically, the use of others' art to create new art. South of the border, the US seems very concerned and protective about copyright, especially music, movie, and software copyright, with RIAA, MPAA, WTFAA, etc suing everyone they can drag into court.
In the fine art world, copying a work is considered an honour to the original artist. Homage to ...
In fact, when you get right down to it, all art is based to some degree on what has come before. We all learn from the masters, and hopefully extrapolate so the next generation can build on what we have done.
Maybe this is the attraction for me of open source software. Any programmer can build on what has been done before, Thus learning from the talent (and mistakes) of the previous generation.
In the music world, there seems to be a real dichotomy. On the one hand, it is illegal to copy music. You can be sued for exorbitant sum
s for downloading one song from the internet. On the other hand, a lot of "artists" blatantly copy songs from a couple of generations ago, yet they add little to the original. Of course there are exceptions to this. If it didn't spoil my argument, I might even say many, if not most renditions are unique.
As an artist myself, I don't want anyone using my work as their own, however I would be pretty excited if someone wanted to use one of my photographs as a starting point to build an image of their own. (of course depending if I like the resultant image, and there is the rub...) I want to maintain control of my creations, but the reason I take photos is to share my vision of the world. If someone else were to use my images in a compilation, I would like to see what they could do, but I also think I would want a percentage of any money they make from the image.

I guess there isn't an easy answer.
but after all that, I still want to share my vision. Here is an image I took recently at Francis King park.