"You do realise," he said earnestly, looking me in the eye, "that what you are doing is ethically quite wrong. You are flouting the rules of commerce, the way the world must operate, and by giving things away you are fully as culpable as those who copy, pirate and otherwise wrongly accrue benefit for themselves. That you do it altruistically, the other way around, is of no consequence, the principle is the same."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. I have read this, and gone away and thought about it, and kept thinking about it, and all the time it bugged me.
Let's say we go back to the principles of Marx. Who makes the so-called "rules of commerce"? Those who own the means of production, because they hold the power, so they make the rules.
As artists, we produce the commodity, or "content", if you like. So
we are the means of production.
But in a capitalist system we don't own the content we produce; it's no longer ours to sell. Instead we sell ourselves (our time and our labour) to record companies, touring companies; those who hire us to perform; those who hold copyright of our work. Our creativity becomes a commodity, like a fridge or gold bullion that you can buy or sell in the marketplace.
The corporations own our labour, and that's how we make a living in a capitalist society, even artists.
People who pirate or illegally copy are ultimately commiting an offence against the owners of the means of production (the people who own us), not those who create the content.
By cutting out the middle man and providing our labour for free, or for love, or whatever, we transcend these "laws of commerce", because we are outside and above them as the original owers of the fruits of our labour.
This is why for example, people who publish books online (like Stephen King) are a threat to the publishing houses. Or artists who post on YouTube are a threat to the record companies.
Anyhow, who says the "laws of commerce" are the rules by which the world must operate? There is nothing set in stone about them. It's just the way the dominant capitalist ideology would have it. There are lots of views about the rules by which the world should operate, and the "laws of commerce" are just one view among many, albeit the dominant one at this particular point in history.
What I am trying to say is that artists are exempt from the "laws of commerce" because we are not by nature commercial beasts. We are creators. We are not the owners of something created by someone else, we do our own creating.