Controlling copies isn't necessarily part of an artist's livelihood, but getting them accurately attributed is

Danny O'Brien's new essay "Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)" makes a really good point about the way that people view copying on the Internet: copying is a ho-hum, every day thing (after all, in order for you to read these words, they had to be copied dozens, if not hundreds, of times) but "passing off" (plagiarism, fraud) is more frowned-upon than ever.

Copying is important in the process of creative remuneration, I feel, because it used to be an excellent tapping point from which to extract value and distribute it back to the creator. Copying cost money, and the only reason you'd do it would be to sell the produced copy for cash. Therefore, it was a perfect statutory location to place a money-pipe back to the artist. Matters blurred when radio broadcasts and performance rights came along, but fortunately the term "copying" could still be stretched to cover these events without anyone feeling too uncomfortable. It always took money and effort to make a copy: costs that you'd almost always only pursue for commercial gain.

In a digital world, many people don't see the act of copying as a particularly momentous or profitable event. Copying isn't what we do as an act of purchasing; copying is a thing we do to our valuable artifacts. People are scandalised when its suggested that you should pay for a copy copied to backup drives, or iPods; they're amazed when vested interests demand that cached copies or transitory files should count as extra purchases. Copying is no longer a good proxy for incoming revenue; which means it is no longer a good place to extract remuneration...

Nowadays, copying isn't always the core part of remunerative creative business. But accurate accreditation very much is.

I'm reminded of the fact that the original Creative Commons license allowed creators to choose whether they wanted their works attributed to them or not, but after a year or two, it was discovered that nearly every CC user turned the attribution switch on while generating the license -- everyone wanted correct attribution, even when they were giving away free copies. Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)

• [Anonymous]

  At least SOME people in the arts community are starting to figure out decoupling!
  Does this mean that the music and film industries will eventually get it, while they still ARE industries?

• [Random Royalty]

  In response to Danny O’Brien:

  I think deliberate misattribution is already taken care in other parts of the law. This is like putting my name on someone else’s work, which is clearly fraud.

  I agree that flowing money through to an author at the point of transaction does seem to make sense, but there is no distinction for this in the law.

  An option would be a “value added” royalty scheme. Clearly copying music to my iPod does not add value and is difficult to monetize. Further distribution in a new form for financial gain is much easier. This is how I understand your argument.

  On the other hand, just because no transaction takes place does not mean that value to the work is not being added. For example, a professor copying an article and distributing to a class adds value in terms of enhanced credibility to the work or the author. At the moment, this is not in the control of the author, but rather to whom rights are assigned in the hopes of adding value to a work (e.g. publishers).

  What is fuzzy is that in the negotiation of contracts, most authors are quite happy to sign away whole swaths of rights in the hopes that a publisher might just flow back some royalty payments.

  In this regard, the concept of added value as a protected moral right would be the only way to avoid the types of abuses that authors and creators often face when leaving it up to others to add value to their works.

  At any rate, bravo for putting the discussion on the table. Lets hope the law designers are paying attention.

• [creesto]

  I have followed a Visual Whistle Blower site for a while: http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/
  And I doubt it has had much impact on the problem of attribution theft.

• [markfrei]

  Nice. One of the first interesting points I’ve heard in the battle in years.

  The value of a work isn’t strictly financial – and frankly depending upon how it’s reused it plays into reputation as well. Hence why Paris weighed in with her political ad (she’s not really a candidate so I can mention her right?)

• [zuzu]

  I’m in favor of attribution for the purpose of “referential transparency” in creative works — particularly scientific research. If you’re building upon an existing work and hit upon a snag (e.g. “I’m unable to recreate the results of your experiment”), you need to be able to go back to the source (attributed) for additional information or verification. Conversely, plagiarism/fraud undermines this process because they won’t know how it was done since they didn’t actually do it. I can easily imagine this extending to “How did you create that sound?” or “How did you come up with the ideas for your novel?”

  However, I’m also accepting of people who wish to publish their work anonymously, pseudonymously, or allonymously. Foremost, every “name” is just as much of a pseudonym as any other; none of us is a static being. But more importantly and pragmatically, there are many political pressures (both governmental and corporate) in which we may not want two spheres of our lives to overlap (ala Mark Felt). Anonymity is necessary for precisely the same reasons that the right to bear arms is necessary. (Remember Jim Bell?)
  

  It seems that you’ve been living two lives. One life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you… help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo” and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for.

• [historyman68]

  The best motivation to release art/music online for free is the hope that someone who likes it will want more. Say, a T-shirt, a CD, a concert, a piece of artwork. Or someone else will remix or cover it and send you more listeners.

• [zuzu]

  The value of a work isn’t strictly financial – and frankly depending upon how it’s reused it plays into reputation as well.

  Indeed, attribution seems to point primarily to reputation systems / trust metrics, which I suppose brings us full circle to Cory’s whuffie analogy.

• [Random Royalty]

  Echoing Simon Bradshaw on the discussion of attribution as a moral right, there are in fact other moral rights (that as far as I know, are still inalienable in Canada). These include altering a work in a way that would prejudice the author, or used in a way to associate the author with an organization as a form of endorsement without his permission.

  I would think that moral rights in this sense are pretty important to maintain, and that would include naturally attribution.

  The problem is that moral rights are difficult to enforce if attribution is given up, but an author could still be found guilty by association through misuse of his work.

• [zuzu]

  Oh, I also just remembered that we should reach out to V. Alex Brennen about attribution, trust metrics, and cryptographic signatures, as a means of financing academic/creative works (i.e. “an artist’s livelihood”).

  c.f. Pseudonymous Software Development and Strong Distribution (PDF)

• [themindfantastic]

  I don’t think this article does much more than open up the fact that yes people copy and there isn’t very much that can be done to stop that but that also we tend to believe that people should be recognized for what they do even if they aren’t getting any financial kickbacks, which when you really think about it, is also against the usual model of corporate culture. When a logo is created for example we associate the logo with a brand or company but we rarely know the artist behind said logo. We hear about Carolyn Davidson in part because Nike have opted to attriute the creation of the work (she created the ‘swoosh’) to her, but a number of times they will give you payment and everything involved goes to them, its theirs in entirety, never having to attribute it. Most people are aware that this is just what happens, and we accept it… but yet we don’t get as morally outraged when finances (and sometimes not even much) get passed for the right to do such things.

• [Oren Beck]

  It’s drop dead simple in concept. You created it-it is yours.

  Any denial of accurate attribution – or attempt to false claims of it is morally bankrupt.

  And to my IANAL take it continues that way even if contracts etc add further stipulations on copyright.
  Assignments of rights etc or work-for-hire may have granted some defined “rights” to another party. It still does NOT alter that YOU created something. From that fact all else is derived. Or should be. Thus the FACT of attribution should be a no brainer to respect. Then again? Respect is now something of an anathema for much of our present world.

• [Mithrandir]

  Sometimes I think we should just accept the fact that the internet by it’s anonymous and nebulous nature tends to subvert the origin of everything it contains.

  The death of “truth” (always a shaky word) is the cost of instantaneous human interconnection. It’s a globe-trotting game of whisper down the alley at lightspeed, and it comes across as a little immature to try to properly credit something you release into this crazy environment for free. Understandable human reaction, but outdated.

• [Baldhead]

  Well many consumers of art don’t actually care who did it in the first place, except maybe as a way to find more, similar art. But making millions is an unrealistic goal in art unless they’ve already been offered to you, so people at least knowing your name becomes more important.

• [zuzu]

  I’d like to see more attribution for the music that’s played on television… that Rob Dougan’s Clubbed to Death is the intro to Secrets of the Dead on PBS, or that Massive Attack’s Teardrop is the intro to House M.D. advertisements, particularly car commercials, are exceptionally frustrating in this regard. When M.I.A. sells out her songs, it’d be nice if people not already familiar with her works knew who it was that does those songs.

  You’d think that with the advent of digital television (ala HDTV) that this would be far more commonplace. Whatever happened to the idea of HDTV including metadata?.. such as hyperlinks so that you can click on a car commercial and go to the car manufacturer’s website, or that you can click an MTV style “popup bubble” about the artist, track title, and a hyperlink to download the MP3 of it.

• [Danny O’Brien]

  Emphasising moral rights aspects of IP misses my point. What I’m saying is that we should recognise deliberate misattribution as a species of a different part of law, because including it in what we want copyright to achieve is using the wrong tool.

  Supposing somebody fakes my signature on a credit card transaction. They fake it *really* badly — big loops, and an “a” instead of the “e”. Now, I neither want a case to fail against that person because it’s impossible to prove in court that it was in any way an accurate copy of my signature, *nor* does society want me to have some special property right in my name that forbids anyone from using it without my permission, even when they misspell it, or it’s clearly referring to another “Danny O’Brian”

  What we want is a law that revolves around the *intent* and aim of that fraudulent act. The part of it connected with “copying” is really irrelevant to the aim. We’ve been misled into making IP bear a lot of this burden, because copying of some kind has always been a contingent part of the fraudulent act (or most successful frauds anyway). But now, copying is a contingent act of almost *everything* in the digital world. There’s no advantage to hoiking fraud cases into IP in the hope of getting a brighter line in law.

  We need to call them for what they are: fraud, and stop getting distracted with copying part.

• [John Coulthart]

  “Well many consumers of art don’t actually care who did it in the first place, except maybe as a way to find more, similar art. But making millions is an unrealistic goal in art unless they’ve already been offered to you, so people at least knowing your name becomes more important.”

  Making money in the future is why attribution counts, and there doesn’t have to be an expectation to “make millions”, making a living is good enough. Consumers may not care who does what but the people who commission artists and designers do, and if someone runs across a free copy of your work you want to be attributed in case they’d like to commission (ie: pay) you to do something new.

  One use of copying where I wouldn’t expect attribution is when people have used something of mine for a tattoo; if you want to permanently etch my work on your skin, be my guest.

• [pentomino]

  What luck that the authors of the unattributed “A Spirit of Christmas” were known, so that they could be hired and South Park could exist.

  This makes me wonder about all the unattributed creativity that abounds on anonymous image boards.

  I also wonder who didn’t ask for attribution. It was probably a mistake in every case, either of comprehension or of consequence.

  There was a Masked Magician who revealed a bunch of mediocre tricks on FOX one day, and, surprise, eventually found the need to “unmask” in another ratings grab. And one day, he approached Penn Jillette at a party, with a woman in tow, and asked Penn to verify for the woman that he was the Masked Magician. Penn started reciting names of celebrities: “David Letterman. Doug Henning. Nelson Mandela. Carl Sagan. Lou Reed. Rudy Giuliani. Dick Clark. Do you know who these people are?”

  “Yes”, replied the magician.

  “What do they have in common?”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “PEOPLE RECOGNIZE THEM BECAUSE THEY DON’T WEAR A MASK WHILE THEY’RE GETTING FAMOUS!” Penn then turned to the woman and added, “I’ve never seen this man before in my life.”

  P.S. I still don’t remember the masked magician’s name, nor do I remember the exact list of names Penn gave when he told this story on the radio.

• [BlackTiger]

  In the online art community, this has been the concern for Decades. Whether it’s people distributing freely artists works without attribution, or sometimes claiming to be the artist, it’s the source of a lot of drama on a few of the big art-gallery sites like elfwood and such.

• [Dr.Arthur]

  There’s an argument I always hear, that “artist only create for profit.” The truth is we do it for expression ( and sometimes street cred! ) I don’t care if people grab my songs without paying. I’d hate it a lot if someone claimed to write my songs though.

• [Simon Bradshaw]

  Cory,

  [On reading my draft of this it occurred to me that it might come across as something of a poke in the chest rather than the honest and friendly query that I can assure you it is. Mindful of how plain text can be interpreted or misinterpreted, please be assured that I wouldn't want you for a minute to take it the wrong way. - SJB]

  Does this mean that you are taking a more sympathetic view of the concept of moral rights? When we spoke after the panel at Eastercon this year you seemed rather dismissive of them, citing the relative success of the US’s economic-based approach to rights over the French approach centring on droit d’auteur. But the right to attribution is one of the most central moral rights.

  For my part, whilst I feel that the argument for lengthy post-death copyright for authors is pretty weak, I think there may be a case for providing a longer-lasting moral right against false attribution. It at least provides a weapon against blatant ripping-off of recently-deceased writers. Alas, I think we’re stuck with death-plus-seventy for both as part of the one-size-fits-all approach to copyright that is part of the system so broken as to lead William Patry to despair of blogging about it.

• [Cory Doctorow]

  There’s a pretty wide gap between continental droit moral and “attribution” as thought of by the CC licenses.