Link Sausages Blotted Up With White Paper Towels

Pass the dark mustard, please...

• One of the problems with pure-public-domain approaches to the arts is the three-part question of who pays for it, who gets paid, and what gets paid for. Contrary to the implications in the article, though, there almost certainly is not an optimal "solution"; the history of the arts in Soviet Russia (and Maoist China, and for that matter in pre-Renaissance Europe) should be more than sufficient demonstration of the repressive power of conformity. Further, governments and other monoliths have never demonstrated an ability to pay for art that challenges the status quo simultaneously in form and in content (at best, it's one or the other). In short, there's a place for a safety net, but that's what it needs to be: Not a primary source of security, but a backstop for survivial. Starving artists are too busy pushing up daisies to paint them...
• Then there's the corollary: Who works there. <SARCASM> I suppose that the daughters of hereditary wealth need something to do with their lives if they prove unruly, unwontedly intelligent and/or independent, or — worse yet — unmarriagable (the worst thing that can befall a social subclass that models itself on failure to read Austen with any sense of irony). </SARCASM> One of the flaws of the Low & Low study is that it doesn't seem to recognize the even-worse demographics of promotion from entry- and entry-plus-one-level positions. In publishing, that means looking at not just editorial assistants and assistant editors, but at midlevel and senior editors; not just at marketing assistants, but at account reps.

  It's not just H'wood, people: The demographics of the decisionmakers and support staff throughout the entertainment industry skew horribly toward upper-middle-class whites who are at least two generations removed from immigrant status. Even they're not getting rich, or at least not predictably... except if they come from the hereditary-owner subclass. There's still a disturbing prevalence of the "Guildmaster's Offspring" phenomenon all too familiar to pre-Industrial-Revolution Europe. Exhibit A: The Sauron Murdoch family.

• All of which is reflected in the reification of the "original" as the only thing worth owning in the visual arts. Admittedly, some of my sneering here comes from my disdain for too damned many of the people involved, and even more from my visual impairment. Let's translate this to another area in the arts: Imagine that the singular print made in the cutting room of Apocalypse Now! was treated — culturally, aesthetically, artistically — the same way as a Rothko original; or the final copyedited manuscript of Galatea 2.2; or the score actually used for the recorded symphonic performance of "Conquistador" (Procol Harum). Instead, though, the "nonsharing patronage" of fifteenth-century Italy seems to be the norm... and the visual arts retain their special-snowflakiness.
• As a sideways second bit of the first sausage on this platter and grudging acknowledgement of the third (which was a bit overspiced and poorly mixed), there's a fascinating — and difficult to understand, if only because I'm not strong enough in any of the languages offered thus far — opinion by the Advocate General concerning how to assess — and, at least by implication, distribute — copying levies. The key point is that levies must be related not to anticipated harms, but to harms actually suffered... which implicitly assumes that reliable data exists to measure the harms actually suffered (and, further, that nobody is cooking the books in issuing royalty statements analyzing that data). Implicitly, then, copying levies may be moving toward death.

  The logic problem with this Opinion is that it relies upon a false dilemma: Either copying levies or nothing. This kind of false dilemma pervades all discussion of intellectual property law, with a particularly stale aftertaste of that first sausage on the platter spiced with the near-rotten weregeld presumption of modern law (that virtually every harm can and should be reduced to an economic transaction in an amount that society at large is willing to accept and enforce). Guys, if it was all about agreed piecewise economic value we wouldn't even have that third sausage...