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A Thought on Intellectual Property
Inspired by some kefluffle.
On the internet, a lot of thought (including me) is put into the availability and rights to creative work: intellectual property.
Considerably less emphasis is put on producing creative work which is actually work someone's time: your own or others.
This seems backwards to me.
On the internet, a lot of thought (including me) is put into the availability and rights to creative work: intellectual property.
Considerably less emphasis is put on producing creative work which is actually work someone's time: your own or others.
This seems backwards to me.
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(I'm looking for the right way to frame this so that I can think on the actual, very real issue I think you're pointing at. If my casting about for a frame I like distracts, just ignore it.)
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Actually, I think you're just coming from a totally different place and perspective than I am, to the degree that we have almost nothing to say to each other.
Your tradition, which we might call the brainstorming tradition, seems to be "people's ideas, naked, are inherently of value, and all the other stuff (the craft, basically), is little more than distractions or added value that someone else could easily tidy up."
My tradition, which is called the authorial tradition teaches that ideas are themselves valueless (everyone has a lot of good ideas all the time) and it is the preparation, selection, and craft of your ideas that gives them any value at all.
For the first, the core question is "how can I get access to as many ideas as possible, filed tidily?"
From the viewpoint of the second, this is obscene. The question is instead "how can I learn to prepare my ideas in the best way possible, to improve my craft as a creative person?"
I'm sure that there are equally strange things looking from the other direction.
yrs--
--Ben
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But the question isn't "how do we judge what is good or not?" There's any amount of critical metrics out there to use. It's "how do we improve our craft?"
yrs--
--Ben
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I think your "authorial tradition" is only one - relatively modern and culture-bound - way of looking at creative work. Part of where the friction comes from is that the much older, much larger tradition of creative work is folk art - which definitely thrives on amateurism, mix-and-match, pastiche, outright theft, and a gift economy. All of these are anathema - as you say - to the authorial model. But the authorial model is foreign to the vast majority of human creative activity.
To the extent that's true, "authors" and "remixers" have little to say to one another.
The other thing is, the whole "long tail" concept is built around the idea that one man's trash is another man's treasure - that anything, no matter how obscure, crummy, poorly crafted, etc. probably has value to someone. Search costs become the limiting factor. Which is why healthy criticism and an RPG culture built around actual play is absolutely necessary if authors (rather than just tinkerers) are to survive.
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You're trying to paint me into a corner: "Because you disagree with me, you must be the opposite of what I agree with."
Stop.
yrs--
--Ben
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yrs--
--Ben
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