Artists

From a post on slashdot

The fact is that any artist is a giant milling machine - in goes ideas and concepts and styles and techniques and disparate things (like banana cereal and dogs peeing against trees) and they all churn and ferment and process and grind and beak down and clump together and then

... ping ... up pops an idea, which because the milling machine is an artist of some description, needs to get expressed in some manner (the non-artist merely stalls at the last step - the process is not unique to artists).

Pretty much sums it up....

More on Copyright

I was reading more on the proposed copyright bill at cbc.ca. It really looks like a candy-coated suicide pill.
There are some seemingly positive aspects, such as it would be legal to format shift content. ie, it would be legal to play your cd's on your ipod. BUT, if the producer puts a "digital lock" on the content, it becomes illegal to break it.
So what constitutes a "digital lock"? How about a text file on the cd saying, "Please do not copy this."

reductio ad absurdum

and further:

Clement has said he would like to fast-track Bill C-32

No I do not trust this ....

Copyright

It seems that copyright (and "intellectual property" in general) is in the news a fair bit lately. Canadian parliament is threatening to pass a highly restrictive "DCMA" style law a la the USA.

As a photographer, I value my work. I do not want someone else taking my art to promote their product, for example, but on the other hand, I do not want to have all art hidden away and unaccessable to the world or, especially, future generations.
A common argument is that Walt Disney's original cartoon, "Steamboat Willy" is still under copyright. In other words, it is illegal to show a cartoon that our grandparents enjoyed as kids. Put in perspective, imagine if Shakespeare could not have written Julius Caesar because the original story was not available. Or if Mozart could not have written his operas because the stories he based them on were tied up in legal knots. Please explain to me how this "promotes the arts".

All art is based on the work of others before. In fact many great works were meant as tributes to masters. My fear is that historians will look back on this century as a second dark ages. Where instead of religion holding all power over publishing works, mega-corporations hold artists hostage.

I read a reply on slashdot that may be on the right track (I lost the link) that advocates aboloshing copyright altogether. maybe the pendulum has to swing the other way for a while to restore balance. It may be rough for artists, but then most artists do what they do for love rather than money...

links:
- Against Intellectual Monopoly