#IP law is a fucking joke and painfully Orwellian and we should all be praying to the Bermuda Triangle to disappear these corporate lawyers

[thecurioustale]

Art Begets Art and the Law Should Respect This

I believe in the tradition of folk art, which is to say: Borrow liberally and lovingly.

It's a practice we've been mostly sterilized from embracing in our modern corporatist society, where all of the big-name, commonly-recognizable "IPs" are imprisoned behind layer after layer of obnoxious lawyers with nothing better to do than torment the innocent. It's a terrible thing, a deprivation of our cultural oxygen—a crime against art and ethics.

As an artist myself, I often have to thread the needle of building upon the inspiring works of others while still remaining within the letter of our outrageous IP laws. It's something I think about a lot.

In Galaxy Federal, for instance, I mentioned last time that the name "Galaxy Federal" was inspired, among other things, by the mention of the "Galaxy Federal Police" title screen of the original Metroid game. When I was settling on this title for my series, I also found that Galaxy Federal is the trademarked name of a bank. I spent considerable time and mental resources, years ago, to determine to my satisfaction that it is permissible under the law for me to use this title.

I have to do way too much of this bullshit, and I know it'll still be for naught: If I ever do become an even remotely successful author, I'm sure I'll be sued anyway, probably for something I never even realized was an "infringement" despite all my vigilance. Because, at the end of the day, for big corporations and for IP trolls, our IP laws are just a racketeering scheme—a side hustle. I mean, Best Western trademarked the word "seniority." If someone wants to sue you, they're gonna find a way.

I am not really a "from scratch" writer. I don't sit down at a blank page and just come up with prose from first principles. My art is almost always inspired by things that I experience in my life, or by the ideas that result from those experiences. Sometimes—frequently, even—my inspirations come from things that are copyrighted or trademarked. I have written in the past about the influence of the video game The Secret of Mana on me as a kid. Among many other inspirations, that game has a neat sandship in it, and that's why the desert easts of Relance are prevalent with sandships.

Over the years I've become a pro at reinterpreting IP-blocked inspirations into usable, original ones—both in terms of the legal research I've done and the skills I've developed at transforming an IP-blocked inspiration into something usable. I've also become more knowledgeable about what I can get away with quoting directly: Certain things cannot be copyrighted, and trademarks have a finite zone of applicability.

It's all a very needless and skill-intensive ballet to achieve something that should be directly accessible. Obviously, there do need to be limits. As an artist myself, I am keenly aware that I wouldn't want to have no special claim to my own work. But if I were to rewrite our outrageous IP laws—and over the years I have amassed considerable material for a book on this—I would make it vastly easier for artists and the public in general to "borrow liberally and lovingly" from the sources that inspire them. Our current IP laws are like a crime-ridden police state: The security is in all the wrong places and just doesn't work. We could relax the laws considerably without hurting artists, and potentially even tighten them in other respects to better combat trolls and thieves.

But in the meantime, here's my advice: Don't let it daunt you. Dance the friggin' ballet. Get good at transformation. Liberate intellectual property from its prison in spirit if not in substance. And, when you're fearless and/or sufficiently obscure, just straight-up pirate. I think society has a duty to reject unjust laws through word and deed.

I don't usually don my pirate's hat, but I do sometimes. When I published the Prelude in 2015, for a limited time I also published a free companion soundtrack consisting entirely of, gasp, copyrighted music. Nowhere is the horror of our modern IP laws more evident than in the realm of music. What I did was basically create a curated playlist, to help set the mood of the story. I don't know if anyone even availed themselves of that soundtrack, yet for me to license all of those pieces to make my limited-time links lawful would have cost me thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars! All for something that it's possible nobody other than me even listened to. That's a crime against art. And it's a crime against artists. Our draconian IP laws hurt small artists the most. If I had had thousands of fans, I'd have been able to pay to play—and I would have done so, or perhaps I would have spent the equivalent money to hire composers to write an original soundtrack. But, as a nobody-artist and a poor person, whose own Curious Score musical compositions are long in the making, the lawful avenues are all unassailably closed off to me. This too is an injustice, of another sort.

Doing the companion soundtrack was the right thing to do in the tradition of folk art. None of those other artists (or, let's be real, the corporate goliaths that hoard most of this "content" in their treasure-vaults) was deprived of a single penny; in fact that's one of the great lies of the IP lawyers and their corporate masters: Cultural interchange usually improves income for people whose work is quoted by others. Borrow liberally and lovingly—and give credit where credit is due.

That's the way it should be.

And, one day, that's how it will be again.

#IP law #IP law is a fucking joke and painfully Orwellian and we should all be praying to the Bermuda Triangle to disappear these corporate lawyers #Prelude to After the Hero