Every generation throughout time has had the right to recreate the legacy of human thought through the filter of their own times.
“Cultural appropriation” and other knock off terms are objectively a part of every creative and functional cycle.
Give credit where credit is due, yet once let into the world a thought becomes a part of such wilds.
Not to mention that when it comes to art, I'd rather consume something that someone deemed important and interesting enough to dedicate skill and time to.
Art is not just about the thing produced, stripped of its context and significance, and forced to be interpreted by ignorant minds who, in their ignorance, consider themselves capable of deriving meaning of value out of words and pictures they can scarcely comprehend from their own limited perspective.
The significance of all art is derived from its historical context, the authors implicit intentions and mode of creation, and the unique experience generated from an individual consuming the art. If you suggest only the consumers experience matters, then you are free to forgo the greater appreciation of art in favor of the lessened experience of it if you wish. For greater awareness and understanding of the details of the parts allow us to better understand the significance of the whole. Only art that is of little value is lessened by our deepened understanding of it.
The problem is a system of strong copyright laws isn't going to fix this system, and from everything we've seen is making it worse.
Demands? Almost everything we do? I only spend 40-50 hours a week max doing labor that anybody would reasonably describe as being commercially exploited. No one’s broken down my door demanding I start making money on the visual novel I’m drafting in Ren’Py on the weekends, nor have I been castigated by my peers for throwing a party without charging an entrance fee.
Far from a universal experience though. People who rely on art to survive right now. People who don't have the energy to do more "productive" work on weekends. And those that work weekends to survive because they don't make a living wage.
As would I, and we are welcome to. That doesn’t mean alternatives must be eliminated.
I agree with you that the ultimate issue is the surrounding capitalist system. But that means solutions need to address the actual problem, the system, and not the symptom, the technology.
It's an understandable position for these reasons:
- We like art and we ant to show our support and appreciation for art
- The most straightforward way to show support and appreciation for art is to give the artist money
- Much of the art we appreciate was only possible due to the promise of monetary gain on the part of the artist
But there are some old, unavoidable questions:
- At what point does the pursuit of monetary gain begin to diminish one's own artistic expression?
- At what point does the pursuit of monetary gain begin to diminish other peoples' artistic expression?
As you point out, there is no art without appropriation and re-creation.
And now there are some new, unavoidable facts:
- Appropriation is becoming easier
- Attribution is therefore becoming more difficult
- Compensation is therefore becoming more difficult
- Rewinding the clock is impossible
The only way out of this would be for humanity to collectively take a puritanical stance on art, where any form of appropriation is demonized. I think this would make art suck.
my deck BBQ caught on fire, problem .. versus ... the 35,000 hectares next to my house is on fire with 20 meter tall flames
is "appropriation" now "easier" ? for whom, at what scale to deliver? at what scale to ingest ?
but it is quite notorious that people don't actually like doing that point, especially, I just have to point it out here, on HN. So...
At what point does the inability of monetary gain begin to diminish artistic expression?
You'd think it was more complicated than that if the people who were doing a caricature of you had enslaved and murdered your family, and lived in the house your family built while you lived on the street.
It doesn't matter, because culture works how it works (and is often used as a political tool), and somehow world culture ends up being people pretending to be Americans pretending to be the descendants of American slaves. But it's undeniably ugly.
And everything wasn't "content", nor did they have massive numbers of influencers and public content creators, nor was there was a push even for laymen to churn heaps of text every day or to project an image to the whole world.
And until recently if you got caught plagiarizing you were shamed or even fired from journalism. Now it's just business as usual...
Cultural appropriation was a term popularised in the heady days of woke excesses when white liberals were desperate to find reasons to be mad at one another for perceived impurity. It's a ludicrous concept from top to bottom.
Intellectual property laws, in my opinion, have a place in our society.