The cover of Lloyd Cole’s Antidepressant is one of my favourite album covers of the year. I just love that painting for some reason. Looking at the cover for The Most Serene Republic’s new record Population I see a record cover that, although there is not much more than a passing visual similarity, feels the same. It really strongly feels like the barest variation in the central idea behind the Lloyd Cole cover, don’t ask me why.
Is that copying? No, it’s the way that art works. People absorb what’s going on around them, assimilate it into their work and move it on a little. People generally don’t know it, but that is actually the definition of innovation: incremental improvements to existing things; although it is generally confused with invention: making shit up out of thin air. Only recently has innovation come to imply anything more than the mundane act of improving upon what is already there.
Often people don’t really know where they get their ideas from. We all absorb so many influences from one moment into the next, and our brains work in such flaky ways, that when inspiration hits us it is virtually impossible to know where it has really come from. At Proper Job I myself am basically paid to innovate, so I am pretty familiar with the process and the act of having new ideas – they tend to just pop in there. If you document your process, as we do with sketch work, then you can often trace the chain of thought back to some extent, but this is unusual, and doesn’t really help you identify exactly where each individual spark originates.
Another example would be these two snippets of violin, one from the start of a Broken Records song Out on the Water, and one from Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’s soundtrack to the bleak but brilliant film The Proposition. When I pointed out to Broken Records that the two refrains were all but identical they were mortified. They’d never even seen the film.
Broken Records – Out on the Water
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – The Proposition #1
I am certain that, similar as the two sound, this was not a case of copying. Ed over at 17 Seconds posted this recently, which sounds more clear cut. Surely Nirvana had to have pinched the riff from Come as You Are from the Killing Joke song Eighties didn’t they?
Killing Joke – Eighties
Nirvana – Come as You Are
Well honestly, I’d be surprised if they did, actually. I left a comment on Ed’s site saying that it would have been very hard for them to defend in court, as the similarities are strong and obvious. But really, this kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes people simply do have the same idea. Other times you hear something somewhere, or see something, and it sticks in your head somewhere in your subconscious. Quite apart from the fact that Killing Joke compassionately dropped the suit after Cobain’s suicide, how can you possibly prove something like this? It is easy for me to imagine that riff dropping out of the back of someone’s head, almost whole, without them having any idea where it came from. Honestly, in the creative process this happens all the time.
I am not saying that protecting people’s genuinely unique thoughts should cease. An artist’s ideas and creations are their lifeblood, even in my job, which is very commercial. But intellectual property law is absolutely throttling innovation. Honestly, it’s insane. People now use patents like buckshot. No matter what they ever intend to do or ever will do or how spurious or idiotic the patent, almost everything in the field of medical device design (my field) is bound and gagged by patents. So many of them are idiotic as well – patenting the idea of using a battery in a hand-held electronic device or something equally stupid. Either the muppets granting these patents don’t really pay any attention to their jobs or, probably more likely, the Western economy is now so frantic about owning thoughts and ideas that pretty much any old nonsense passes muster as patentable. The fact that the Chinese treat it with utter contempt seems only to have intensified the scramble, oddly.
Now I repeat, I know intellectual property must be protected. It’s what I live off. But the very concept of intellectual property is supposed to value and encourage innnovation, and in many industries it is simply strangling it. We, simply, have to issue less patents. And we definitely have to be far more bloody choosy about what we deem to be a patentable idea, because at the moment some of the IP I have seen is utterly spurious.
The problem is that the commercial process is all about ownership and competition, but for a huge part of its output it relies entirely on the creative process, which is the absolute opposite. Creativity (and I include pure science in this) relies, in general, on collaboration, sharing of ideas, cooperating, and building slowly from one concept to the next. Eureka! moments, if not entirely mythical, are marginal. The two approaches are directly at odds, and the more commercialism encroaches on the creative process the more it kills it.
With lawsuits and all it may get messy occasionally, but in general I look at the sort of movement of ideas in the music industry and I get a little jealous.
