one basic question to ask about sopa-type stuff: what aesthetic climate is produced by a corporate intellectual property model of 'content' or arts creation? so, warner bros. can't spend $100 million on sherlock holmes unless they can protect their copyright. but every dollar spent on special effects in sherlock just made the bombastic emptiness more bombastic. really, you can ask beyonce how great big record companies (as parts of huger conglomerates) are for artists and perhaps she will enthuse. go back and ask the average even modestly successful musician in 1990 what he thinks about the artistic effects of giant record companies and who made the money. then just ask the average professional musician; he got dicked by some record company. he never got heard. he got signed. he recorded and it never saw the light of day and he didn't even own the masters. you know, ask john grisham. but then ask a hundred comparable novelists who never happened onto the little-bitty gravy train. ask yourself, on average, how good, how interesting, how bold, the average shimmery pop song is, how really good the average hollywood blockbuster, the average bestseller, the average sit-com, etc. it just has not served most artists or most experiencers of the arts well at all. these companies suck money out of the arts; they don't nurture them or broaden participatiion.
in short, under the trad intellectual property model there are too few artists who are promoted too heavily: too much money directed at too few works and producers. the budgets are so big that only a few works can be made, and much of the money is spent to manipulate an audience toward those few works or outlets. all of that necessitates assertion of ownership over digital or textual or sonic structures. the arts are conceived by giant corporations fundamentally as hierarchies with a few huge stars at the top. great stuff has emerged, even so, and there are, it is true, things a filmmaker can do for $100 million that she couldn't do for 1. but your chances are better of getting a good movie making a hundred movies for a million each rather than one for 100 million, and that 100 million is a temptation to corruption and bombast and pandering. we need to start thinking in terms of millions of producers finding their own audiences, and artists need to remember why we are artists. i hope, not for the small possibility of the huge prestige score, but for the intrinsic meaningfulness and satisfaction of the work.
