Bricklin on How the Artists Will Get Paid
Dan Bricklin, best known as a co-creator of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, has posted a great essay entitled How will the Artists Get Paid?. Bricklin looks at the issue from a historical perspective and is optimistic that new technologies do not doom creative people to a penniless existence. Here’s a little taste:
In computers, we’ve seen that fluid, general purpose programs like word processors and spreadsheets have usually prevailed over the more structured systems. People do with them what they want, not what the creator envisioned. (I can tell you that first hand with the spreadsheet…) DRM systems we hear about are based on a particular model of use, with an aim for absolute control to that model.
With art, which is usually used or experienced by others for their own purposes, there must be generality and lack of control to let others do what they want with it. An ecosystem with many ways for unintended free-release is a requirement. Therefore, an ecosystem which looks to a mixture of the traditional amateur, performance, patronage, and commission forms of payment is a requirement. Depending upon rigid enforcement of performance payments will disrupt the balance.
Listening to representatives from the recording and movie industries, you would think that selling fixed artifacts is the only way that artists can get paid. That has never been the case, and should not be in the future or else society and art itself will suffer. Those publishing businesses may be based on that one form of payment, but the artists’ livelihood need not.
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