Digital Britain Minister Insists No One Is Creative If They Don't Earn Money
from the oh-really,-now? dept
Andrew Dubber does a nice job taking Digital Britain minister Stephen Timms to task for claiming that "If people can't be paid for their creativity, they're going to stop being creative."On the face of it, that's an incredibly stupid thing to say, and is amazingly offensive to the vast majority of people in the world who are creative amateurs.He goes on to suggest that a statement like that, so revealing in how Timms views the world, should get Timms fired, as he's basically admitting that he's only there to protect corporate interests, rather than actual creativity.
Note: I did not say "the vast amount of creative people in the world who are amateurs", though this would also be true. Most people in the world do creative things for no money. The vast majority of music in the world is made for cultural reasons that are not economic. To suggest that the only reason to be creative is with the expectation of payment is utterly offensive.
Beyond stupidity
But it's not just stupid and offensive -- it's corrupt. It's so manifestly and obviously false that it could not possibly be the considered belief of a rational human being.
The alternative (and indeed, the only plausible conclusion) is that it's a deliberate falsehood in order to support something that is utterly indefensible when examined with any intellectual honesty.
It's the direct result of corporate lobbying, it's entirely disingenuous, and it's a bald-faced lie echoed to support the interests of powerful and moneyed multinational organisations.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: amateurs, business models, copyright, creativity, money, music, professionals, stephen timms
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Suprising how???
And any comments as such that some of the dimwitted will swallow is good enough... thus the big push to censor and control the interweb, the facts come out and dont go away, which shines lights where "they" would rather people not look.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
the anti mike
What Stephen Timms is so obviously corrupt and eye-wateringly ridiculous, that anti mike has no way to spin this one his way, so he clams up.
The troll has been beat.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Art precedes payments
Not that I can top the "Dubber Timms Drubbing", but the other item that reveals Timms' statement as utter falsehood is the simple fact that artwork was around long before people received formal payments. Cavemen didn't have lawyers to ensure that the copyrights on their cavepaintings were protected. Humans create art because it's part of what makes us human.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Art precedes payments
Money. Sad but true.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Art precedes payments
2 words for you, "Burning Man"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Art precedes payments
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Art precedes payments
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Art precedes payments
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Art precedes payments
Today they are just called paintings. Not house paintings. Just paintings.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Art precedes payments
Excluding the little ones that love to draw on the inside walls of a house.
Graffiti has been around for ages from the caves to the modern day streets.
Funny though, today it is against the law to do it and people risk harsh punishment and still do it why? they don't get paid why they do it?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
That's obviously the way a politcian would look at it though: don't do ANYTHING without a buck attached.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
"All humans are greedy selfish sociopaths. No one would ever do anything unless they profit directly from it."
Its like trying to formulate a more elegant response to "the sky is green" than "look at the sky you idiot, its not green"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Nothing wrong with the good old, 'here's their quote, here's my response'.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Even that valid method of discourse can sometimes be discounted as Fisking. Sometimes the only way to deal with obviously stupid remarks is to call them out on their blatant stupidity up front, rather than argue over the trivial details of why they are stupid. In this case, the point is being made that the stupidity is either due to ignorance, or they are feigning stupidity out of intentional malice. In either case, such stupidity entails a valid grounds for impeachment.
In this case instead of saying Timms is too stupid to live, it suffices to point out he is too stupid to govern.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
TWO WORDS
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Wow
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Wow
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Wow
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Wow
Society is so trapped in a money/profit 24/7/365 delusion that we can't imagine anything different. I may give creative work away for free, because it advances something more important than my bank balance.
There's no shortage of creativity out there. As a photographer I'm selling my time and my attention -- sometimes that comes at a premium, other times I don't want the complications of money attached.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Wow
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Wow
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Wow
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Creativity
Not to mention all the gaming mod sites. Thousands and thousands of very creative game levels for all sorts of games, made by fans, for fans.
I would venture to say that the majority of creative expression in the world is NOT done for money.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
We've just gone through nearly a century where the model was:
1. A small elite of super-rich "celebrities" about whom you couldn't help but know.
2. A much larger non-elite of artists/creative folks who wwere not motivated *exclusively* by the financial or "fame" attendant to #1 above.
3. A small sub-set of non-"Celebrities" who nonetheless aspired to/lusted after the "celebrity" lifestyle relentlessly pimped by the beneficiaries of #1 above.
4. The rest of the populace, who were relegated to the status of mere "consumers" -- as opposed to PARTICIPANTS --- in the culture which surrounded them.
The "consumer" was merely required to pay whatever the Elite could gouge price-wise, and passively accept any/all restrictions the Elite could manage to buy/bribe from their cronies -- whether they took the form of ever-longer copy"right" terms, more draconian abrogations of "fair use", etc.
The *real* danger posed by the Internet, Creative commons, remix culture, etc. -- is that in an environment of ubiquitous creativity ("User-generated content", remixes, mashups, etc.) the specious distinction between "professional" artists and "amateurs" doesn't make any sense, and the only way they can retain such a specious dichotomy is by defining it all in terms of whether you get "paid" or not. (Can't really claim that "professional" musicians draw *all* of their income from music, either, since they sell T-shirts and fan memorabilia and such.)
Interestingly, with the advent of micro-payment or any of the other business-models Masnick and others have been highlighting, it will become *much* easier to "get paid" for participating in culture -- with all that such mass participation implies. (The "new paradigm" won't really *have* the "big megaphone"-type celebrities, so the mindless levels of opulence -- the "celebrity lifestyle" -- probably won't be possible.
But, personally, If 100 artists can manage to get 20,000/yr. where 1 "mega-star" got 2 million -- I'd consider the culture *and* creators -- to be far "richer".
Awaiting TAM's predictable defense of the "celebrity lifestyle", or denunciation of "remix culture" as uncreative, or some other specious nonsense...
(Maybe we'll be lucky, and find out he spilled his "morning coffee" on his computer....)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
I agree with everything else you're saying, but that really is how the words "professional" and "amateur" are defined. Maybe it's increasingly hard to tell the difference between the two groups, but that is just what the words mean.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Who created the catagories, and decided that they should be mutually exclusive?
In other words, is your quibble "descriptive" (in that you're discussing how the majority of people use the two words) or "prescriptive", in that you believe that the two mutually-exclusive categories *designated* by such words, have some sort of empirical merit?
It's "hard to tell the difference" between the two, because ultimately there *is* no difference. Under the old (dying) RIAA-style corporate paradigm, the *sole* source of revenue for even so-called "professional" musicians was never *solely* the music. Everything from T-shirts and memorabilia, to product endorsements represented a "stream of income".
So the claim that the status of "professional" ever required that one's "profession" was *ever* the sole revenue-stream, has always been specious.
Funny, with all the negative connotations that the corporate megaliths/their apologists tie to the idea of "patronage" (whatever form it takes), at base, their business-model was *all* about acting as their contractees "patrons" -- and taking the lion's share of any potential financial returns.
My point was, that if the mark of a "professional" is that one's *sole* source of income be related to a single activity -- or class of activities -- then there have *never* been "professionals", of any kind.
There may have been *primary* areas of relative specialization, but to the extent that, for example, Doctors dealt in real-estate, or any other income-generating actitvity (even "on the side"), it neccesarily follows that the practice of medicine was *never* their SOLE source of income.
So why do *some* musicians/authors scoff at the notion that multiple streams of income should be unneccesary for *them*? Is it because their present patrons (the multi-national corporate media megaliths) have spent decades training them to implicitly *or explicitly* view themselves as an "elite" group? I'm pretty sure that has *something* to do with it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
A widely held view in Europe
"Copyright is the basis for creativity. It is one of the cornerstones of Europe's cultural heritage, and of a culturally diverse and economically vibrant creative content sector."
http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/docs/other_actions/col_2009/reflection_paper.pdf
So began the European Commission's latest contribution to the debate about online content.
Simon
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: A widely held view in Europe
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
In defence of my 'vitriol'...
I'm sure I could construct a measured and thoughtful argument against the position in a calm and reasonable article, but for now, a rant on my personal blog served to be therapeutic.
Was not really trying to make a convincing argument. Was just trying to say "I'm very, very angry".
Want clear and thoughtful reflection on what's happening in digital culture? Read Techdirt. Want to know what I'm doing, what I find interesting and how I'm feeling? Read my blog. Different texts and contexts for different purposes.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: In defence of my 'vitriol'...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Things other than copyright!
Many would argue the following 'snag' list is more important to our connectivity and creativity than the copyright issue. These include;
1) The internets naming and addressing remains a kludge,
2) The lack of transparency in Broadband package parameters - peak hour bandwidth allocations (30kbps), quality of data transport all need to be transparent.
3) Re-writing of UK Communications law which today is focused on preserving the telephone service and its costs into perpetuity.
4) Cost recovery regime for ISP based on achieving a 16 fold increase in peak hour bandwidth availability, not call termination fees.
5) An end to the anachronism of fixed and mobile - all connectivity is a cable with a radio at the end.
6) To use the radio spectrum to increase the bit commons, not something to be sold to the highest bidder who can then ration its use as per the current plan.
While your slagging Timms off for some poor sentence construction we are missing the chance to outline a better shopping list.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
amateur arts
Come, on, be sensible now. Our country is justly proud of, say, The Royal Ballet Company, which attracts thousands of visitors from all over the world to marvel at their expertise. It's not the same as Strip The Willow in the village hall is it ...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]