Re: When Elephants Dance

From: spike66 (spike66@ATTBI.com)
Date: Sat Mar 30 2002 - 12:52:58 MST


Rüdiger Koch wrote:

>Humans are creative by nature and money has nothing, really nothing to do
>with it...
>
Money has everything to do with it. Money allows the creative
segment of society the freedom to create. It provides an
incentive to feed, clothe and shelter the creative.

Thought experiment: name some famous Russian classical
composers. Just the biggies, ones that you can think of
without looking at your CD collection:

Rachmaninoff. Tchaikovsky. Shostakovich. Prokoviev.
Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov. Stravinski. Maiskovski.

And there are plenty of other Russian classical monsters.
Now name some famous American classical composers.

1. Aaron Copland.

and... ummmm... lets see, Copland annnnnd... dont tell me...
ummmmm... [five minutes later]

OK Aaron Copland.

Russia and America are two very different societies with similar
people genetically, with similar numbers. Yet Russia has
produced classical music two orders of magnitude greater than
America, at least two orders. They supported their classical
composers. They figured out a way to keep a roof over their
most creative heads allowing them to create works of great
beauty, while our counterparts to Rachmaninov and Prokofiev
were spending their creative energy working at the local
McDonalds trying to raise enough money to pay the rent on
their miserable hovels. Tchaikovsky, grab a mop and get
your commie butt over here, clean up that spill! Stravinski,
three large orders of fries, STAT!

Of course, America got jazz and rock out of the deal, so
I suppose it comes out even.

What I want to see is some means of maintaining support for
the training and development of art that is not a government
subsidy but rather is voluntarily funded by large faceless
corporations, with a profit motive. If we defeat copyright
and the profits that go with creating content, then the faceless
corporations will have ever less incentive to pour money into
the arts and we get Copland, as opposed to Rachmaninov.

I guess I am arguing that intellectual property is a good
thing. If we wanna play, we gotta pay. spike



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