Award Winner for Volume 23
Creative Labor and the Claim of Exclusive Rights to Non-Rivalrous Goods
Following Lockean intuitions, many creators of digital artifacts claim inalienable moral rights to their non-rivalrous creations based on a belief that, since any given creation is exclusively the product of its creator’s labor, that creator is solely responsible for its existence. This claim of ownership is supported by what is often taken to be another axiomatic position: the creator is, by themself, responsible for the value added to the artifact achieved. I deflate these claims from both theologically informed Lockean and secular post-Lockean folk perspectives, by underscoring the part played by uncredited others in the creative process; here, I explore and defend what folklorists have called collective creation. I argue that the understanding of creation as a wholly independent endeavor wherein the creator creates within a vacuum is a Romantic fantasy that should be discarded. Since nothing is created in a way in which others do not contribute, those most responsible for the creation—so, those holding copyright to it—have an imperfect duty to share some of their digital/digitizable work with others, when they are able.
With additional pieces of property – photographs, poems, prose works, etc. – being digitized and published online with each passing day, this is a critical time for all of us to reflect on how the rightful owners of those artifacts should allow their creations to be used by others. The creators of many such artifacts claim moral rights to these works based on the assumption that: since any creation is solely the product of the creator’s labor, that creator is solely responsible for its very existence. This is supported by an additional premise, often accepted on its face: the creator is the exclusive source of the value of the artifact. I believe that this is misguided, since this position fails to consider the significant contributions of countless unnamed others that have influenced the creator, in their creating. All creation is – to some degree – what folklorists have called collective creation. Given this, and given that sharing use of various non-rivalrous goods with others can positively contribute to their creative projects, I have argued in this paper that creators have an imperfect duty to share some of their digital/digitized work with others.* As members of a growing online creative community, I believe this is the least we can do to benefit the work of others.
In researching and writing this article (and its companion piece), I was able to deeply explore my own beliefs about the nature of creation, and, in light of this, to fine-tune my intuitions about the moral obligations that creators have with respect to aiding others in creating. This project also afforded me the opportunity to reconsider what is essentially creative in this very kind of research and composition, and how scholarly work is, itself, a form of collective creation. As a result, I came to recognize just how similar academic creation is to – to nod to a form of art that I’m particularly fond of, and which I discuss in the companion paper – Hip Hop. Sample some of this, sample some of that, oxygenate that creative spark, and introduce something into the world which is both novel and grounded in the endeavors of other creatives. That is academic labor, at its best.
—Roman Briggs