How Music Got Free and Creatocracy

Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood

While you’re at it, fling a few pennies (£2.99 eBook, or £2 audiobook) for a monograph by Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of Prozac Nation and Bitch, which makes a fantastic companion.

To say this is a wind-up is something of an understatement: Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood is a riot, and two groups of people in particular will hate it: freetards and European snobs. For whom it might induce seizures, or possibly even strokes.

But Wurtzel is not simply trolling, she’s a lawyer at David Boies law practice; Boies was the scourge of Microsoft during the antitrust litigation. She knows her stuff. Creatocracy actually more of a “duograph", if such a thing exists: a hymn of American exceptionalism, and to the glories of intellectual property law.

“In establishing at the outset that all creative people would be at the mercy of the marketplace, the Framers invented a uniquely American form of creativity, which is commercial, widely appealing, and inevitably the stuff of empire.

The Constitution is the force behind Hollywood and Silicon Valley, behind rock stars, and rocket scientists, and everything we love and everything we love to hate."

"Short of returning to a patronage system – which is pre-American – there is no substitute for intellectual property."

When post-revolutionary France passed a copyright law it was called a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Genius’. Wurtzel adds: “In the United States, you are a genius if people buy what you are selling”. Today France produces “one of the shittiest rock music". The hucksterism of this system often treats the artist poorly, but then, life isn’t fair.

But it’s quite a bit more than Team America’s America, Fuck Yeah! set in prose.

I enjoyed her gentle dismantling of Thomas Jefferson’s views on intellectual property. Wurtzel thinks Jefferson is celebrated today more for being a “cool” guy (which he was, very) than for the quality of his arguments, and some of his arguments are full of holes. And I enjoyed her debunking the idea that “dumb” audiences are “passive listeners”. A work of art is constantly alive and changing in the soul of the listener. Even a “stupid pop song” matters so much.

Celebrating subjectivity is pretty uncool these days. In the world of bien-pensant public intellectuals – the kind of people who go to TED talks – subjectivity doesn’t exist. So great art doesn’t need to be tweaked or remixed (I made the same point here a decade ago when mash-ups were all the rage ). Beethoven needs a good orchestra. And Billie Holliday isn't enhanced by overlaying some beats. Remixing celebrates machines not humans.

Wurtzel ends by echoing Adam Curtis: social media feeds the rat of the self, leading to solipsism and self-absorption.

“The Internet is more like all that we are trying to escape,” Wurtzel whereas “music is a way out.”

I enjoyed it enormously. If you can achieve the apparently impossible (for social media) feat of holding in your head an idea that you don’t necessarily agree with, you might too.

* * *

There are no winners in the copyright wars except (temporarily, perhaps) giant technology companies and lawyers. I suppose that’s what happens when you leave the future to lawyers, rather than businessmen and lawmakers to sort out. Businessmen have to leave something on the table. The technology giants seem only dimly aware that they’ve achieved such power thanks to a loophole, and the richest of them put nothing back.

“Being evil while telling everyone else not to be ... is how big business makes big profits, and it is more apple pie American than selling snake oil and claiming it is an elixir. Whatever Google is selling, all of us paid dearly for free.” ®

Author Elizabeth Wurtzel
Title Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood
Publisher PowerHouse Books
Price $12.95/£9.99 (Paperback), £2.99 (eBook) from Amazon UK
More info Publication web site