A lot of my day job involves work about copyright. That is why you will notice that I am now so careful about using only free and fair use images and giving credit. It’s made me paranoid. But also, I really didn’t know much in the past. I thought, for example, I could take anything from Wikipedia and it was okay. It turns out, that’s not true. All images on the site are free, but most of them require attribution. I’ve just taken to providing attribution regardless, because I like giving people credit. I’m grateful that I can use their work to provide a better experience for my readers.

But last night, I was thinking about the Barack Obama “Hope” poster, which was created by Shepard Fairey. It’s a beautiful design. And after thousands of parodies, beyond the visual idea, it is clearly hard to render well. But back in 2009, I was listening to Fresh Air, and Mannie Garcia was being interviewed. He was a photographer for the Associated Press, and it turned out that Fairey had used one of Garcia’s photos as the basis of the “Hope” poster. It was because there was a legal battle going on: how dare Fairey “steal” Garcia’s work!

As a legal matter, I think what Fairey did was entirely in keeping with the letter and spirit of fair use. Garcia had taken thousands of photos. He didn’t recognize that Fairey had used his image because Fairey hadn’t. Fairey used a small part of one of his images and made something totally new. But Fairey knew the slippery legal foundation of all this because he tried to hide the source of his poster. That was stupid, but probably standard operating procedure, because the way the law works, if everyone had a good enough lawyer, nothing would ever be created.

The way it worked out, Fairey and the AP made a settlement where they would share the royalties going forward. I believe Garcia was squeezed out of the deal all together. Think about that. Fairey takes a small part of an endless supply of photographs that the AP publishes, each of which has negligible marginal value. He turns it into something that is not only of great cultural important but also of great financial value. And he has to share the profits from that. This is rent seeking, pure and simple. This isn’t about art. The AP hired Garcia because they wanted photos to go with an event that was being covered. This is just a big business forcing an innovative small business to pay it money. It is a kind of protection racket for big corporations.

But what bugged me in the interview was that Garcia was offended at the idea Fairey would just go online and look for images — that he did not “condone people taking things, just because they can, off the Internet.” The nature of all art is acquisition. But in the visual arts, it’s totally out of hand. No one would ever be sued for using the phrase, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Yet that is exactly what happened in the case of the “Hope” poster. In fact, it was even worse, because that particular element of that particular photo is not nearly as memorable — and creative — as Chomsky’s sentence.

The original purpose of copyright was to encourage the creative arts. It has been a long time since that’s been true. Now copyright discourages the creative arts. All copyright really encourages is the promotion of things that look salable and legal action against creative workers. It’s sad. And it means that creativity has been corporatized. It’s just another sign of an empire in decline.

Afterword: Copyright and Fair Use

It’s amusing that Fairey couldn’t use part of the original image to make his iconic poster. But Wikipedia can now use his poster — a far greater creative achievement — under fair use.

I’ve written before about 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. But last night, I came upon a lecture that Chang gave in support of the book at the London School of Economics. I’ve embedded it below. If you haven’t read the book, you should at least listen to the lecture.

In the lecture, he talked about something I quite remember. He made the point that it was a myth that people were paid what they are worth. You hear this kind of nonsense a lot from the likes of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek and really any free market absolutist. The idea is that the market is never wrong. If you are paid $20 million per year, it is because that’s what the economy — more or less God the way these people see it — has decided what you are worth.

And really, since the late 1970s, I’ve heard this nonsense from a lot of people. It is very much a matter of faith. Because there is absolutely no evidence for it. And there is plenty of evidence that it just isn’t true. But Ha-Joon Chang provided a great thought experiment regarding two bus drivers: one in Sweden and the other in India. Bus drivers in Sweden make 50 times as much as bus drivers in India. Is the Swedish bus driver really worth 50 times as much as the Indian?

Well, I know what the free market absolutists would say: yes! You see, the Swedish bus driver is transporting people who pay more money. Therefore, this bus driver is worth the greater amount. But this is a very abstract view of the world. It is something that the free marketeers don’t much want to discuss: value is meaningless. In this way of thinking, the bus driver is not primarily driving but rather conning people to pay him for transporting them.

As a matter of reality, it is almost certainly the case that Indian bus drivers are better because they have worse and overcrowded equipment and drive on worse roads. If you transported the Indian bus driver to Sweden, they would have no trouble doing the job. Moving the Swedish bus driver to India would not work out nearly as well.

It got me thinking. Ha-Joon Chang doesn’t speak English all that well. He has a very bad accent. But his writing is great — certainly as good as mine. Now he also happens to be one of the best economists in the world. So I don’t have to compete with him for writing jobs. But if he can write English so well, there must be plenty of other people from South Korea who can write English as well as I can and who would be willing to write 2,000 word articles about XML for less than I charge. And that’s one country — one that doesn’t even have a history with the English language; imagine what it must be like in India!

By American standards, I’m still pretty poor. But even still, I get by very nicely. Compared to people in other countries, I’m rich. And that’s an accident of birth — just as surely as it is for Donald Trump. Not that I’m comparing myself to Donald Trump. We are quite different. First, I’m actually good at my job (even if over-paid) and Trump is not. Second, I do understand my privilege (even if I’d likely still be very surprised just how much my standard of living would go down in a truly fair world).

There are other things to think about, of course. Most measures of health and happiness are based upon local inequality, not global or absolute inequality. But I think it does us all good to remember just how talented the human family is, and that we should feel good about being part of that. We are all special in our way. But that’s not something that we Americans need to be reminded about.

On this day in 1776, Thomas Paine published (anonymously) Common Sense. As regular readers know, I greatly admire Paine. But not for Common Sense. Don’t get me wrong. Paine was an amazing rhetorician. But there was always a sense with him that he was at heart a rabble-rouser. The content of the pamphlet strikes me as overblown, given what the colonists were going through. And then it is taken to a whole other level in the 13 pamphlets of The American Crisis.

I admire Paine for his more sober writing: The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. And it is interesting to look at his reputation in the United States with regard to this. In as much as he is considered a hero, it is because of Common Sense. But it contains passages like this that could have been written by a modern glib libertarian:

To be fair, Common Sense is more closely argued than that passage indicates. But still: is this how Americans see the government today? I don’t think so. Yet this is what Paine is loved for. Meanwhile, it was with The Rights of Man that made Americans start to turn a jaundiced eye toward him. And then they actively hated him after The Age of Reason. But these are great works of the Enlightenment. Paine understood the intellectual currents of the time. And typically, most Americans wanted to push back against them. Paine saw that the future laid in humanism, and America became focused on the Second Great Awakening.

Afterword

On this day in 1927, Metropolis was also released. It was hard not to write about it, because it still amazes me that it wasn’t that respected when it first came out. It blows my mind even today. No one has improved on cinema since then. But I’ve discussed it to some extent in the past, Fritz Lang.

Jonathan Chait wrote a great and thorough article earlier this week, Being Less Crazy Than Donald Trump Does Not Make Marco Rubio “Moderate.” In it, he went through all of Rubio’s positions to show that he is on the hard right of his party. Chait made a good point of the fact that Rubio goes around talking about his education reform idea. But he does it so he doesn’t have to talk about his extreme positions. In addition, his education program is tiny. It would be like Hitler going around campaigning on the idea of the Volkswagen. But our media would just report about the Volkswagen, just as they are reporting about Rubio’s “moderation.”

The truth is that the three Republican candidates for president — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Rubio — are all extremists. They really don’t disagree about anything except how they ought to talk about their policies. In as much as they have policy differences, they all belong to Trump who looks liberal compared to the other two. So we have one candidate who the media currently has no problem calling an extremist, and he is the least extreme. Currently, of course, Ted Cruz is surging in the polls. And Brian Beutler thinks this is a good thing, Ted Cruz Is Exactly What the Political System Needs. It is subtitled, “Why Republicans and Democrats alike should welcome his nomination.” But for the second time in a week, I find myself very much in disagreement with him.

To start with, Beutler makes the argument that it would teach the Republicans a lesson. The media have been making this argument for decades. The conservative base always claims that they lose because they don’t run a “real” conservative. But this is not an actual argument. It is axiomatic. If a Republican loses the presidency, it is because they were not conservative enough. What every conservative “knows” is that the only reason any Republican ever loses any race is because they aren’t conservative enough. It’s like the old line, “I don’t know how Romney lost; everyone at the club voted for him!”

But the really dangerous assumption is that Ted Cruz would lose the general election. I don’t see that as a given at all. He could be Hitler pushing a new kind of car and he would win if the economy falls into recession next year. But there is another thing that will go on. As soon as it becomes clear who the Republican nominee will be, the elites will rally around him. They will talk about him as though he were just a garden variety Republican. (And they’ll be right, but not in the way they imply.) And so the mainstream media will not cover any of these three as though they are freaks. It will be the usual “Republicans are equal and opposite to Democrats.” If anything, we will see articles about how extreme Clinton is and how moderate Ted Cruz is.

The last thing that the American media ever want to do is admit that anything is wrong in the good ol’ USA. They act rather like a dysfunctional family at Christmas. “Don’t do anything to upset dad. Let’s just pretend that everything is okay.” But everything is not okay in America. We have a substantially better healthcare system today than we had seven years ago. Cost trends are down; access is up. It is the first step we’ve taken on the healthcare front to join the other advanced nations of the world. But every one of the GOP candidates wants to get rid of it on day one. They want to make life infinitely harder for the poor and middle class at the same time that they want to funnel huge amounts of money to the rich. This is a program that should appeal to at most 5% of the population. Yet it is a program that roughly 50% of the people will vote for.

There is something really wrong in America. And a big part of it is that upper class journalists keep insisting that nothing is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you vote for Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But in fact, the decision really does represent the difference between millions of people dying. I know that sounds hyperbolic. But lack of healthcare kills people. Ever wider access to guns kills people. Lack of food kills people. Pretty much everything the modern Republican Party stands for kills people.

But on the television media and in the mainstream press, about all you’ll hear is that Cruz is polling well in Texas and Clinton in New York. And otherwise, there is no real difference.