Soon to be legal: Art Theft

Surfing on the internet, I caught wind of this news article reporting that there is a bill that will affect the entire creative industry of the US. Art, music, and everything in between will be affected by this bill should it become law.

When you get past all the hysterical writing and advocating to context your local representative, you find out what the bottom line is should this law get passed.

Congress wants to make art theft legal.

Now here is where I get confused, which is probably why I don't follow politics very often let alone get involved. Apparently, the way the are going about doing this is by claiming a work of art, whatever media that is, as an orphan or abandoned work. This means that you can pick it up, mess around with it, and call it yours even if all you did was change a color swatch or put a MSPaint line of text on it for your company's name. And then, in theory, I can turn around and do the same thing only call it art. And then someone can take my image and mess with it again to turn it into a shirt.

And the cycle repeats itself.

What I got out of the article is that creativity is going be pretty much killed off. It's mostly amount money and who gets it, yes, but it also is about use of creative material and being creative. The two are totally different from each other.

This kind of mirrors something Jason told me one night over the phone. Should this law be passed, I can legally make art using Mickey Mouse and not be penalized. (I can't be penalized anyway to begin with unless said product makes Disney look unfavorable, but that's a tangent for another time.) In return, that also means that Disney can search through my posts on MiceChat and use my idea for one of their dark ride products. It also means that I can legally draw an image of a Small World doll photo realistically and sell it as art with no real creative intent behind it.

Let's go an extreme (and very unlikely) route to show how creativity can be killed by this. Let's say that Jason's picture of himself nude with a vacuum cleaner draped around him is published in a magazine. Then, somebody in a graphic design firm for a vacuum cleaner company sees it in an article and thinks "That's a great image! I can use that!" The next day, he presents Jason's painting, completely unaltered, to his marketing boss. The only changes he made is include a white box of text with the company's product spelled out underneath the painting. The boss loves it. The ad is published. Jason finds the ad one day at gracing a department store ad in the USA Weekend that came with his Sunday Newspaper.

Yeah, I'd be upset at this point as well, mostly because nobody gave Vac-U-Suc the permission to use said painting in a commercial setting. On top of that, the very action is pretty much saying that the graphic designer, whose job it is to create an ad for the company, can't do their job without resorting to using someone else's creative material. But the company can get away with it by claiming the photograph documenting the painting is an orphan work and has no copyright protection. Ironically, I can say the same thing about Disney's Songs of the South or even the second half of Gargoyles Season 2. And as such, I can get the media from those films and TV shows and then sell them on DVD under this law. And Disney can't do a damn thing about it. (Well, maybe with Songs of the South since that's not within the 35 year time frame of affected media under this bill.)

I knew from the moment I said I wanted to be an artist that I wasn't going to make a lot of money. I never knew that eventually my creativity would be ultimately killed legally. I would have it killed off in the same manner as a presidential sniper, silently and in a public fashion because of a personal problem left unresolved.

Well, I did my part in making a few people aware of this issue, so I guess that would also be me getting involved in politics despite my failure of understanding it as clearly as I understand the mechanics of my computer.