Drinking From the Wellspring
Why you should steal ideas from others
I was a saddlemaker for many years. and I’ve been a musician for even longer. It occurs to me that the two paths are not all that dissimilar, that they have some basic things in common.
Those who follow these paths make things up, from scratch (or nearly so), using some tools, some materials, and their wits. Both create intellectual property, or creative content if you want to call it that. Both can claim ownership of that property.
For the saddlemaker it’s his designs, patterns, and finished creations. For the songwriter it’s her songs and compositions. But the paths diverge once their so-called intellectual property sees the light of day.
Craftsmen do what craftsmen do…we make stuff. When I made a saddle, or this briefcase for instance, I knew that once it left the saddle shop door I no longer had creative control over it.
Whatever happened to it, whatever design changes it might undergo, it was no longer my concern. My name was stamped on it, but the design was not mine to control any longer.
It could be copied by other saddlers, or it could be changed by the owner somehow. If copies were made of it I wasn’t about to sue anybody over them. In fact, I appropriated others’ designs, just as every other saddlemaker does.
The old highback saddle, above, took its cue from a late 19th century saddle made in Miles City, Montana. The briefcase was inspired by the great house of Hermès, the original design being well over a hundred years old.
Neither are the same as the originals. I didn’t plagiarize those. These pieces are not knock-offs. They are repurposed ideas; they’re a logical and artistic evolution of design and function.
Copying designs is not about plagiarism. When you borrow a good idea and incorporate it into your own work, three things happen:
· It elevates the level of your work
· It gives new life to an existing idea, a rebirth, a repurposing
· In its own small way, it enriches our culture and makes our world a bit more vibrant and interesting
Saddlemakers know this intuitively. Fashion designers know it. Even automobile manufacturers know it. For the most part, these industries are relatively free from copyright lawsuits, especially considering (in the cases of fashion and cars) the ENORMOUS sums of money that are made within those industries. They know that they need constant renewal, which means reusing, remixing, and giving new meaning to existing ideas and designs.
Music, film, publishing, and the arts? Not so much. They don’t want renewal at all. Much to the contrary, they want to control their ideas forever, and continually work to bolster copyright laws to make this happen. They want to sue you if you borrow a single line from a song, or part of a scene from a film, or the name of a character in a cartoon.
The copyright process has not only changed our laws, it includes lawsuits, vilification of offenders, and the systematic polarization of the public at large. Generally, it forces us to choose sides in the copyright argument raging over illegal downloads and unlawful appropriation of so-called “intellectual property.”
As a sideman, a person who plays for other artists onstage and on their records, I use the saddlemaker’s approach to my creations. When I create a musical part on a song, it is most certainly my composition, my own creation. However, once I walk out the recording studio door, it’s lost to me. I have absolutely no control over its use or its ultimate fate on the recording.
And that’s the way it should be.
We session players do this as a work for hire, and we let go of our intellectual property as if it had never belonged to us. And we’re happy to do so, because it’s the making of the music that’s important. As artists who make “creative content”, we basically want two things, in this order:
1. People to listen to our music
2. To somehow make a living
Many of us can (and do) live without number 2, but none of us would give up number 1.
Yet we seem to be stuck in an argument that focuses solely on the second thing, a stance that has shifted the idea of copyright from a UTILITARIAN concept to a MORAL one. It was never meant to be moral, and still is not meant to be.
It was meant to enlarge the public domain, by giving creators a short monopoly (seven years) over their creations. This would give them incentive to produce more work, and the existing work would enter the public domain, to be available to all of us. But copyright law has been usurped by industry, and has put an end to that idea. [Hint: read Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts about this].
Why is it that I’m happy to let go of a design for a bag that took 160 hours to make, yet I find myself wanting to keep control of a song that took me an hour to write? Why is the song more precious to us than the artifact? I don’t know.
But here’s a tidbit from Woody Guthrie that sums up the argument and reveals how he felt about numbers 1 and 2 above. Woody says:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don’t give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
I don’t want to preach here. We need copyright law. It does serve a need, but it has been twisted so far away from its original purpose that it now produces the exact opposite outcome of that original intent. Instead of enlarging our public sphere, it is rapidly shrinking it.
In order to freely access creative content you have to go all the way back to 1927 to find public domain material. For the most part, we’re not allowed to incorporate contemporary media into our works at all.
Here’s some food for thought. You can share your ideas. Don’t be afraid of letting go of them. And don’t be afraid to avail yourself of others’ ideas, as well.
We need to create a much larger public sphere, with more creative waters in the wellspring from which we draw our inspiration. And what the hell, it makes for an interesting world.
Go ahead…steal my ideas.
