On Ownership

I heard a report on NPR today about a new bill President Bush signed into law that would create a cabinet-level "pirate czar" - not the kind that would wear an eye-patch and say "Arrrrrrrgh!" with a Russian accent, but the kind that would crack down on the piracy of intellectual property, like the "drug czar" supposedly cracks down on the illegal drug trade.

Now, I know being a "starving artist" is not just a metaphor, but a reality for a number of folks who are trying to make a life and a living following their true calling. So I by no means think artists should not be paid fairly and appropriately for their work.

But the thought occurred to me, as I was listening to this report, that after thousands of years of music-making and storytelling, there is nothing new under the sun. Nothing that anyone writes today is truly original - all the metaphors, images, chord progressions, etc, that we could possibly come up with are all borrowed from someone (or several someones) who came before us. So is it really fair to say anything is one person's intellectual property? Is it fair to take something that once belonged to the common good, slap your name on your own arrangement of said material, and start charging the public to access it and/or deny others the ability to borrow from you (as you yourself have borrowed)?

I then thought of how eerily similar this is to another situation in our nation's history - when western Europeans came to this country and imposed their understanding of private property and the accompanying rights it entailed upon the indigenous people who considered land an un-ownable public good. Essentially, this is the same understanding of private property now being imposed upon cultural, instead of natural, resources.

Maybe I wouldn't be grousing about this as much if I thought the law was meant to protect the artists. But it seems like it's more geared to protect the financial interests of the corporate managers of the artists. Certainly, there's got to be a happy medium - something that protects the artists from the abuses of both managers and patrons, but doesn't put the creative commons under lock-down and reward inalienable rights to whoever slaps their name on an old idea first.