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I hope your comment doesn't get downvoted too heavily, because I think you raise good points. What seems to be happening, and is happening in this document by
by JieJie 3y ago
I hope your comment doesn't get downvoted too heavily, because I think you raise good points.
What seems to be happening, and is happening in this document by W3C as well, is that the social value of information and the economic value of information are being conflated. Social media has created markets for creative works where these two values become entangled.
Another way to say this is that commercial art and fine art are different things, but they are treated the same by the web and perhaps they shouldn't.
When someone creates fine art, they are not creating art for the sake of its economic value. They are creating a work of art for its social value, and want it distributed as widely as possible.
When someone creates commercial art, they are creating art specifically for its economic value. That value may be enhanced by wider distribution, but it may also be diluted by wider distribution.
Because these two types of art need to be treated differently by the web, we can't have one solution that benefits both kinds of art.
We need both copyright to protect commercial artworks, but we need a system that encourages wide distribution of the collective information of humanity, allowing equal weight to everyone's ideas, outside of their economic value.
i.e. Kafka's ideas are more valuable to humanity than Beavis and Butthead.
This W3C draft doesn't take that into account. It needs to. We need to think beyond the needs of artists who rely on social media to ply their wares, while also taking into account their needs. We should not, however, codify the social media influencer art market, because that is not a market worth protecting. It's an aberration that encourages people to share personal information and works that benefit the platforms and harms society. We want to build something that benefits society and the individuals who contribute artworks that benefit society today and into the future. And if you can find a way to make a buck in the middle there somewhere, we should encourage that, too.
- JohnFen 3y ago> When someone creates fine art, they are not creating art for the sake of its economic value. They often are, though. "Fine art" only means that it's art without practical utility beyond being art. A painting is fine art, for instance, where an ornate silver teapot is not, as it has practical utility. Whether or not either type was made for economic reasons doesn't enter into it.
- JieJie 3y agoYou are correct to say that the distinction between fine and commercial art is beyond an artwork's practical utility, but I think we could both agree that the market price of art does not necessarily equate to its overall social value. That is what I was getting at. It's more about economic markets not capturing social value, and copyright's role in protecting economic value to the detriment of social value. Outside the scope of my comment is whether copyright is even capable of protecting social value (I tend to think it isn't), but if it is, W3C should be the organization that steps up to make the attempt.
- jprete 3y agoI think you're making distinctions that artists themselves don't make, and underestimating how much they can be financially motivated. The most surprising example I know is illustrated by this apocryphal story: "...someone visited [Picasso's] studio, stood in front of a painting for several minutes, and asked Picasso, 'What does it represent?' Picasso replied without hesitation, 'Two hundred thousand dollars.'"
- testermelon 3y agoWhether it is possible to find pure-economic or pure-societal art is not relevant. And we can't dismiss the existence of these two dimensions, which you can also call "consumption mode" or "purpose". In (my) definition, art is everything a human make or do that is capable of evoking emotional reaction from another human. So it follows that IMO, art's value is primarily societal in nature. The economic value comes afterwards. The economic value of art mainly harnessed by people that want to evoke feelings in other people, those in entertainment industry like movie producers, game directors are an example of this. And this is where the push to make art-making labor cheaper mostly come from. The societal value mainly comes in two forms. 1) Capturing the world around us for a record, and 2) as a medium for communication in emotional or subconscious level. This value is seperate from the economical one, and I think is the most important one.