April 3, 2005

The legitimacy of profit  

Daniel Henninger's premise in this WSJ piece is so obviously flawed: he apparently thinks the reason people create art is for financial gain, and yet the whole history of human creativity stands in defiance of such a claim. There are plenty of other breakdowns in his argument -- the gross inefficiency of the music industry, despoiled as it is by agents and producers, might be the biggest one -- but his real problem is that he misconstrues the motivations for creating art to begin with and therefore misses the central idea of this ethical sea-change.

Has the lack of a good old fashioned enforceable intellectual property right deterred people from putting their photos, their words, even their music online? Not if they're amateurs -- and to the extent that eliminating peer-to-peer file sharing would prevent those amateurs from self-distributing, it's simply not an acceptable solution. The government should be working to protect the rights and creative potential of the amateur and the small-time professional artist, not the industry of ready bystanders who divert the profit from creative talent. Maybe Henninger's problem is he has too much faith that the current system works, and that under it artists are being what they deserve.

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