Sharing Culture

Culture is a joint undertaking—a co-production—of individuals and society. The symphonies of Mozart, like the songs of Lennon and McCartney, are works of genius. But they also arise from the culture in which that genius lives. The instrumentation, the notation system, and the prevalent musical forms are the dough from which composers bake their cakes.

So too with ideas. All thinkers and writers draw on stories and discoveries that have been developed by countless men and women before them. In this way, all new work draws from the commons and then enriches it.

Today, unfortunately, this cultural commons, like the commons of nature and community, is being enclosed by private corporations. The danger is that corporations will deplete the soil in which culture grows. The remedy is to reinvigorate the cultural commons.

Paying Our Pipers

Artists need to eat. In the past, wealthy private patrons supported them. They still do today, as do government and universities, but the sum of their gifts is insufficient. So where can additional money come from? The answers affect not just the quantity of art, but the quality.

What we need is a parallel economy for non-corporate art. Fortunately, models of such an economy exist. For example, there’s the San Francisco Grants for the Arts program, funded from a tax on hotel rooms. Since 1961, the program has distributed over $145 million to hundreds of nonprofit cultural organizations. It’s a prime reason the city pulses with free concerts, murals, film festivals, and theater in the park.

Then there’s the Music Performance Trust Fund, set up in 1948 to settle a dispute between the musicians’ union and the recording industry. Record companies now pay a small royalty from recording sales into a fund supporting live concerts in parks, schools, and other public venues. In 2004 the fund sponsored over eleven thousand free concerts throughout the United States and Canada. Thanks to this system, sales of corporate-owned music support the living culture on which the recording industry ultimately depends.

These models could be scaled up. As a revenue source, consider what companies like Disney get with their copyrights. They get ninety-five-year protection for their movies, they get those FBI warnings on our DVDs, they get the U.S. government extending intellectual property rights worldwide, and they get police busting street vendors for selling “pirated” DVDs. That kind of protection is worth billions. Yet the companies’ price tag for it is exactly zero. (They do pay taxes, but so does every-body else.)

What if, instead of supplying copyright protection for free, we charged a royalty on sales of electronically reproduced music, films, and video games? The resulting income could be distributed, through a National Arts Trust, to local arts councils, which in turn would support community arts institutions and artists. Under this system, corporations would give back to a commons they now take from for free. More art would be live and local, and more artists would be employed. We’d have corporate and authentic culture at the same time.