I watched a podcast yesterday via Creative Insurgents that brought up some interesting arguments against the use of copyright. Artist Gwen Seemel talked about why she doesn't apply copyright to her work and it got me thinking about what role it plays in today's highly digital art marketing world.
My understanding of intellectual copyright is that as soon as you have created something it becomes your intellectual property. If you then have an issue with someone taking it and reusing it in any way you could theoretically take them to court citing copyright violation provided you have proof of your ownership. That proof can come in the form of journal entries, sketches, photographs etc....
This is enough for me. I am happy to not go the extra step and officially copyright my work (I'm not even sure what the process would entail to be honest!). I think in this day and age the vast majority of an artists' marketing must come from the internet. To market your work effectively on the web you need to allow your work to be seen across multiple platforms. To allow this you are effectively allowing reproduction in at the very least digital form. So in my opinion this would nullify any existing digital copyright anyway. Right?
If I was to fully copyright my work, if I was to say to people "no, you cannot reproduce this ever" am I effectively saying do not for example pin my images onto boards on Pinterest, do not share my images via Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else? If that's the case then what's the point of having this blog and putting my artwork out there? If I do that in the hope that it will then force people to stay put on my site I am very effectively limiting my audience and my potential earnings to the relative few who stick around on here. If I don't allow fair use, if I put full copyright on all my work, then wouldn't it be hypocritical of me to see something someone else has done and then want to incorporate that technique or style or image into my own work? Would I then, as the title of this posts suggests, be hindering my own artistic creativity?
I have copyright stated at the bottom of my blog, and on my home page I ask people to respect my property and use proper referencing and credit when taking my work elsewhere. On my portfolio page I ask visitors to not reproduce my work because they are my images. Is that a double standard and just confusing to people? Or is it (as I hope and assume) just common sense? I personally feel like I am saying to people "feel free to share my stuff anywhere you like, but just make sure you credit me if using my words and tell people I created it if using my artwork". I feel like I'm telling people it's ok to do that, but not ok to use my images and try and pass them off on their own. In that sense I am applying copyright to my work but still allowing for sharing via the internet with the ultimate goal of my work being traceable back to me.
I don't want other people making money off things I've created and put my hard work and effort into unless I make that decision. But I want people to be able to feel comfortable sharing my work and using it in assignments, articles or any other way, so long as they let people know it is my work not theirs.
What do you think? Do you think the way I have stated my usage restrictions, let's call them, is obvious or is confusing? What do you think constitutes fair use of an artists' work and if you can't share images is it going to hinder your work in the future?
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