It shows the natural limit of IP in art generally. Artists have always captured the enemies weapons & made them their own in battles (think Cocteau said that). They’re always judged by the outcome – they should have put them to better use. hguoht ylsuoireS, If the issue of plagiarism leaves us indifferent, where does that leave IP laws? In its very weak form its almost meaningless and in its strong form it’s wrong.
I think there's probably something midway between "weak" and "strong" that we might entertain. That we're actually (mostly) already doing.
Orson said it’s an attack on property and the acquisition of property. You’re not sure why a film attacking property is an argument against property, Yoda?
Aye. Why is Welles imbued with a special authority here? The issue of intellectual property is just as affected by economic considerations as it is artistic ones, and lots of artists have downright insipid views of how the world should work, even as they display tremendous understanding of other core human experiences. The two don't seem to correlate much, and might even correlate inversely. And if artists
do have a special authority here, that's even worse for the anti-IP side, since they seem to mostly disapprove of people consuming their work without compensation. Very few actually give their work away.
Artists obviously have something to say about the degree to which all art is necessarily derivative, but I don't see (and this is my response to the first quote, too) much evidence that IP laws are constantly running roughshod over fair use or homage or anything within a mile of the kind of "borrowing" that's endemic in art. Most IP laws aren't pretending there are new things under the sun (or under copyright protection).
And again, that's assuming that it's accurate to say
Citizen Kane attacks property in a sense that rebuts IP laws (as opposed to just, ya' know, mindless material accumulation).
If the statistics (though maybe it’s not a statistic if the number is uncountable) prove anecdotes – ie eye-witness accounts of actual facts – false, or irrelevant, or unrepresentative then that is that. Nevertheless, one wants to be particularly careful of the alleged objectivity and relevance of statistics, especially when they run against common experience.
What common experience do you feel they run up against? It seems to me the most common and frequent experience for all of us is a massive pile of artistic works so expansive that we literally can't find enough hours in the day to keep up.
An American professor of philosophy was once approached by a researcher with the question 'how many pages of philosophy do your students read a semester?' ‘Well,' he replied 'I could check that for you. But isn't there a difference between ten pages from a popular handbook and ten pages of Aristotle in the original?' 'That's a matter of opinion. The number of pages is a matter of fact.'
It sounds like the point of this story is that there's a lot of art, sure, but most of it is bland and/or commercial, yeah? Assuming I've interpreted it correctly, it's kind of ironic to be parsing which art counts as real/meaningful, in the name of defending artistic expression in general.
Going off topic as usual.
Eh, I dunno, I feel like it's kinda more on topic than half the replies. It's certainly better than people haphazardly rationalizing just wanting to see movies for free. At least this is about the core of the issue in some form.