46. Intellectual property: artists useful as poster children

(unpublished)
29 November 1996

On interpretations of private intellectual property Rick Salutin writes: “...you don’t write in order to earn; you earn in order to write and reach your readers.” (Intelligent theft is a pillar of artistic creation - 29 November) This may be more literally true for letter writers than columnists.
I do agree with Salutin that domestic industrial interests have frequently used artists rights as a front for their own competitive agendas. This is after all capitalism and its trickle-down economics have found artists useful as poster children.
Many causes of ‘mutual beneficence’ have produced creator-industry coalitions around policy legislation or sectoral subsidy demands. Here we find the nucleus of campaigns about intellectual property, tobacco sponsorships, magazine postal rates, joint subsidies for domestic media arts/information productions, etc.. These often suffocating industry-dominated alliances nonetheless provide one of the decreasing ‘tricklings’ wherein artists, non-profit community producers and their projects can access auxillary sources of financing and the occasional attainment of peripheral legal rights such as copyright protection. For example, thanks to the efforts of the copyright collectives, CARFAC and CANCOPY, an unexpected $200 irregular payment for “unallocated photocopying” - in this case for visual artist members - apparently is a copyright payment in the mail.