An enticing and sensible proposal–unlikely, alas, to win over today’s Hollywood-bought politicians–comes from Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Excerpt:
The institution of copyrights has its origins in the feudal guild system. Copyrights provide an incentive for creative or artistic work by providing a state-enforced monopoly. Like any other monopoly, this system leads to enormous inefficiencies, and creates substantial enforcement problems. The size of these inefficiencies and the extent of the enforcement problems have increased dramatically in the Internet Age, as digital technology allows for the costless reproduction of written material, and recorded music and video material.
The artistic freedom voucher (AFV) is an alternative mechanism for supporting creative and artistic work. It is designed to maximize the extent of individual choice, while taking full advantage of the potential created by new technology.
The AFV would allow each individual to contribute a refundable tax credit of approximately $100 to a creative worker of their choice, or to an intermediary who passes funds along to creative workers. Recipients of the AFV (creative workers and intermediaries) would be required to register with the government in the same way that religious or charitable organizations must now register for tax-exempt status. This registration is only for the purpose of preventing fraud – it does not involve any evaluation of the quality of the work being produced.
In exchange for receiving AFV support, creative workers would be ineligible for copyright protection for a significant period of time (e.g. five years). Copyrights and the AFV are alternative ways in which the government supports creative workers. Creative workers are entitled to be compensated once for their work, not twice. The AFV would not affect a creative worker’s ability to receive money for concerts or other live performances.
The AFV would create a vast amount of uncopyrighted material. A $100 per adult voucher would be sufficient to pay 500,000 writers, musicians, singers, actors, or other creative workers $40,000 a year. All of the material produced by these workers would be placed in the public domain where it could be freely reproduced.
I like the idea, which would jibe well with TeleRead, a great way to spread around public domain works and copyrighted works alike, while also cataloguing them. AFVs would be one more business model, and the more the merrier, from the viewpoint of freedom of expression. While TeleRead proposes ways to use the library model to pay for conventional content, I’m completely in favor of alternatives as well, especially those which would enrich the public domain and lower TeleRead’s costs. Yes, about AFVs, skeptics might ask: “What kind of quality control would exist beyond public taste? Didn’t Mencken say that no one went broke underestimating it? What about editing? Or a different issue–promotion?” Yet one can envision writers and the others paying for the services of individual editors, marketing specialists and the rest. More importantly, the proposal would still allow intermediaries, including publishing houses specializing in modern public domain works, to flourish. At the same time, please note that AFVs wouldn’t abolish publishing houses reliant on copyright–they’d simply have to spend more on writers and less on corpocracy to come up with the right wares to compete. And of course along the way the megaconglomerates would be able to print and otherwise make money from the modern public-domain novels and the rest.
In areas such as international blockbusters, requiring vast amounts of financing, the old business models might still prevail in Hollywood. But independent film-makers might well be able to draw on AFV talent for the character-driven movies that Hollywood these days too often shies away from, given its slavish fixation on the global market. What’s more, even large movie companies could legally use public-domain novels by contemporary writers, not just long-dead ones. Too, they could distribute public domain works from AFV-oriented companies. Similarly the big recording studios could use modern public-domain lyrics and spread around recordings from AFV-oriented independents and from public-domain musicians, who, of course, would still be free to move on in five years to the copyright approach. As for artists, imagine how much large content-providers could benefit from the wealth of new public-domain works under the AFV approach.
The question is whether Congress would approve AFVs, lest political donors be offended. Hollywood parasites, especially, would hate direct payments to the writers, musicians and artists on whom they prey. Still, as enough Net-dumb voters die off, a smarter bunch can rid Washington of the old farts who oppose new ideas like AFVs.
Not to say that all tech-hip people will love AFVs. I see a plethora of clueless posts on Slashdot following the item there. The warnings against an AFV-rolling buddy system won’t cut it with me, for this could be addressed legislatively (in the Real World, writers groups are limited in how much organizing they can do in terms of, say, official rate-setting). What’s more, the present system has its share of abuses–in the form of overpaid movie executives and the rest. Not to mention the efficiency with which the likes of the former AOL Time Warner plundered the 401(k)s of average Americans. Beyond doubt, an AFV approach would give the public more for its money than the entertainment establishment does now.
