As we have discussed previously in this class, laying down an appropriate incentive structure is crucial to developing a culture of innovation.  Within a group or organization, incentives can come in multiple forms: peer recognition, greater responsibility, personal satisfaction of tackling a challenge, and money, to name a few.  How then, when talking about copyright and creation, can policy makers move beyond a incentive structure that seems so solely tied to money?

The inherent problem with this framework is that while art has always been tied to money (and power), either through patronage or through commodification, the link between money and the impetus to create is more tenuous and almost impossible to prove.

As earlier Christenson readings cautioned companies against becoming too focused on the bottom-line because it locks them into a pattern of behavior that can lead to missed opportunities, the current copyright system (since 1976)  also seems locked into a mental mode that centers around the image of the individual as the lone creator whose ideas exist in a vacuum of his our her own making and therefore should have sole ownership and compensation of that work.  However as Vaidhyanathan lays out in his interview with Stay Free! Magazine, the copyright holder is rarely the artist his or herself.

“we should not romanticize copyright as an author’s right.  It starts out that way, but that’s not the whole story”.

So, there are two issues to consider: how do you provide the appropriate incentive to create, and how to you compensate creation.  I think that when copyright was originally enacted, these two issues more tightly overlapped or aligned, but with the proliferation of digital technologies, these two issues have diverged.  Before, creators were just as likely to work by themselves, as they were within a group of people and had more control over the “vacuum” in which their creation emerged.  They worked within a specific industry, within a specific group, with specific works, often confined by geography and access and therefore could more confidently claim themselves as the sole owners of their creation.  However, through digital technologies, access to other works, people, and ideas is boundless and has changed creation into an act that almost always is built upon something else or is collaborative.  There can be less of a claim of control over the act.

Copyright is solely concerned with the second issue – compensation, and while the reason for copyright is to provide a financial incentive to create, Vaidhyanathan makes the crucial point that copyright really serves as an incentive to market and distribute work, not necessarily to create.  As Vaidhyanathan sees it: “If copyrights disappeared tomorrow, there would still be poetry but there wouldn’t be Star Wars”.

Ultimately, Vaidhyanathan concludes that we are really dealing with an outdated bundle of policies that don’t really address the issue of providing incentive to create.  In reading the article, I began thinking that access itself could be the greatest incentive to spurring creation.  For example, early blues musicians had access to rich music tradition and history that they could draw upon, remix, and create something new.  Currently, we are laying in a place a system that is allowing the removal of works from the public domain through high protection of digital copies.  While creators should be compensated for their work, copyright might not be the appropriate avenue for compensation if it ultimately stifles the ability to create in the first place.