A Tiny Revolution: Five Dollar Friday

#5DF

Starting today, every Friday I’m going to give five dollars to someone who’s produced something funny/interesting/worthwhile and is giving it away on the internet(s).

Obviously the internet is the greatest distribution technology ever created for music and writing and video and journalism. But it’s also obvious it generally makes it more difficult for people producing such things to earn a living.

So I have three goals with this:

1. Finally start paying some of the people who’ve created wonderful things I’ve enjoyed.

2. If possible, get lots of other people online to start doing this as well. It would be a beautiful thing if it grew and grew, and three years from now 10,000 people were giving away $50,000 to artists every week. To help get things rolling, I’ve created the twitter hashtag #5DF. Every week I’ll link to the recipient of my five dollars on twitter with that tag, and if you start doing it I encourage you to do the same. (I’ll also archive all my recipients here.)

3. In my most grandiose dreams, this idea would—in the process of becoming popular—make people realize that we need a new way to fund all kinds of art. In theory the internet should be a dream come true for artists and people generally, but it will never fulfill its potential if everyone is trying to eke out a living from advertising or just what other people are willing to cough up on the spur of the moment.

I’m convinced the answer is something like Dean Baker’s Artistic Freedom Vouchers. Baker’s proposal is that the government give every adult a $100 voucher each year that they could in turn give to anyone producing anything creative.

You could donate $50 to a local band you love, $40 to The Real News, and the final $10 to a favorite blogger. *clears throat, points at self* Or any combination to anyone. The only catch for recipients is that if they accepted AFV money in a particular year, for a period of time afterward (say, five years) everything they produced would be copyright free. They could still charge for performances, or ads in their newspaper, or whatever. They just would have to allow anyone anywhere to make copies of what they did, or use what they did as part of their own artistic work.

This would cost about $20 billion per year, which is less than 1% of the federal budget—i.e., nothing in the scheme of things. But it would support 400,000 artists per year at $50,000. All of a sudden artists would have a way to make a living doing what they love, and everyone else would suddenly have a gigantic new source of stuff. (It would be more difficult to get stupendously rich, but that’s not the goal of most artists…and in any case, you could always stay with the old copyright system if you wanted.

 

I'm in....

Posted via email from Jim Nichols