N.B.: 10/3/2009: Since writing this piece, I have decided that it is a bit of an over-reaction, but I keep it here for your entertainment.
As an artist who cannot consistently rely on large institutions to promote his events, I make use of on social media, so without hesitation, I did what I and many other artists and presenters of my acquaintance do: I posted an event listing for the staged reading Total War to Facebook.
As one would hope when one does such a thing, actors and attendees start to invite friends or repost the event listing.
Mark Jaquith, who blogged about some of my other work was kind enough to post my listing to his Facebook account. Which interestingly enough, elicited the following response:
[Name Withheld] sounds like a fine play to me, i'm searching the net for its script to read
Which just struck me as an odd thing for someone to write when clearly the event is a staged reading of a work-in-progress, and anyway, still under copyright. I had posted an earlier draft to a seemingly now defunct website that was designed with the purpose of facilitating contact between playwrights and producers, so I had made the work digitally available in the past for a limited audience,
I responded:
Ian Thal I'm the author and the script shouldn't posted on the net, at least not in the form that will be presented on October 11th.
[Name Withheld] thank you! i was unable to find it, but will continue to this winter, just in case you post it somewhere. the synopsis is quite interesting and itself well-written.
In other words, "I'm looking for a free version of your work-in-progress." This, irked me as I am also a writer, I don't take kindly to people nicking my work. More importantly, I have had my work nicked (blog entries reposted elsewhere without attribution, book reviews quoted or reprinted without attribution or permission, et cetera) but this was the first time somebody had the chutzpah to tell me, "I would like to nick your work, because it sounds really interesting!" This is despite the fact that I am already making the effort to put my work out for a public viewing.
Now, I admit to reading free digital versions of copyrighted works, but due to my sensitivity to the issue, I only do so when the work has been made freely available by author or publisher, or when work for which I would be willing to pay due to its historical importance is no longer commercially available due to ownership disputes between author and publisher, or corporate censorship by the publisher.
I'll also admit that I can't afford to pay to see every play I want to see, so I volunteer as an usher, win promotional tickets, get tickets in exchange for teaching workshops to supplement my meager theatre-going budget-- so even most of my "freebies" are really barters for my service to the community-- and even then, I do not get to see everything I want. I'm not sneaking in through the fire exit, or asking somebody to sneak a video camera in.
Ian Thal [Name Withheld], I'm not planning on posting it to an open forum at any point in the foreseeable future. There are a lot of issues involved including protecting my intellectual property rights.
[Name Withheld] of course. i'm sorry to have forgotten that issue. best of luck on your opening night.
I'm not even sure what conclusions to draw from this exchange. Is this simply how technology has changed how the work of artists is viewed, or is this just the latest permutation of ways in which the labor of artists is devalued by the culture that still consumes product of their labors?
What I really don't understand is the source of hubris to actually tell the artist, "I intend to nick your work the moment I see the opportunity."
Yet, I am of two minds here, Shelly MacAskill's video of my performance of "The Marmalope" was to my benefit. Essentially, it could be called a "bootleg" but at the same time, it shows a performance that requires a prerequisite amount of training to replicate and serves as an advertisement of my skills as a mime and physical comedian, so my first inclination when I met MacAskill socially was to thank her for posting the video. Does the qualitative difference between full text and documentary video overrule the similarities?
8 comments:
Since when is asking to read a play equivalent to an intention to steal it? Given the evidence in your blog, all the person wanted to do was read the play. Why would you object to that?
The person in question is almost certainly filled with good intentions but the exchange to me seems symptomatic of several overlapping problems that many artists now face. The first is that people expect there to be free copies of available on the web and they want them now, even after the author has stated that he has no immediate plans to place the work on the web.
This becomes problematic for me both because the piece in question is a work-in-progress (albeit, one that I think is near completion), and that when information is moved around in digital format, it's not actually being moved; it's being copied, and more it is copied and the more difficult it becomes for the author to control the content.
So obviously, I want to restrict distributing full digital copies to people with a vested interest: actors interested in reading for me, playwriting competitions, development conferences.
If Tony Kushner were staging a reading of his next great play, most would understand that the text of this work-in-progress is unlikely to be on the web at least not with Kushner's approval. However, Kushner is famous (and well he deserves to be) so everyone expects to pay for his work, while I am not famous, so my work is expected to be freely available.
The other part is simply that I've just had repeated experiences of people just demanding my work for free.
Ian, I'm with you on this issue generally but want to point out one difference between plays and other works that might be significant here. With a book, an essay, a poem, etc., reading is the end result, the purpose for which the work was created. With plays, there is another step, the penultimate presumably being performance rather than just reading. As I understand it, licensing fees are paid when plays are performed--even by public school theater groups and such. As such, someone seeking plays for performance might well want to screen many of them without purchasing and then pay for licensing when one has been selected.
I know that leaves all of the issues you raised open, but it does add another dimension that perhaps makes the whole issue even fuzzier with regard to plays than with regard to other works.
Tiffany,
You are correct that this is a fuzzy issue, that's why I deliberately tacked on a discussion about the video of one of my performance pieces that was posted on to YouTube. I clearly felt very different about that particular dissemination of my work; was it because it was qualitatively different?
I think what it boils down to is that instead of a direct request addressed to me, perhaps with some explanation like, "I'm an actor/director/contest judge" or "I have a strong interest in the topics that your work addresses." I was being told "I will continue to look for an opportunity to download your work."
After having a few days to think the matter through, it has become clear to me that, yes, I over-reacted.
I agree that it can be a problem for people to make money from the arts when you have so many people that are looking not to pay for stuff.
But to me this seems a little different since the guy wanted to read the play and wasn't trying to watch the finished project (the play)
It's common to see free scripts or lyrics to songs posted online and I don't think people it's stealing as they would downloading a song or movie and I can easily see this guy thinking the same things with plays
Well, Free Play, as I have since stated, I believe that I overreacted, if not in my concerns about authors' rights, certainly in terms of how my rhetoric addressed this particular incident.
Nonetheless, a lot of authors do not post more than excerpts of their work on line-- and a lot of the examples you cite, such as song lyrics, are not posted with the author's permission-- and I have a lot of ambivalence regarding the current expectation that artists' works be provided for free.
The point is also to protect a work-in-progress by limiting access only to the "involved parties" so to speak.
I've decided to experiment with posting Total War to bushgreen, a social network for playwrights and potential audiences and producers.
http://ianthal.blogspot.com/2009/12/total-war-on-bushgreen.html
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