I Wrote a Story for a Friend - By Julian Gough

But this opens up an important question: certainly important to me, because my ability to feed my family depends upon it. If I turn my art into a gift… how do I live? Of course this is not my unique, personal problem. It’s not even a  new  problem. It’s the universal problem faced by all artists, throughout history. 

Ask yourself: How should a decent human being react, under these odd circumstances? Not a lawyer, not a PR person; a human being. What action could you take that you would be  proud  of, looking back, when you are old and near death, when you have made all your moves in the game of life? What action would your  kids  be proud of

Copyright law was originally brought in to help artists make a living. But over the past century, corporations like Disney, Sony, Universal, and Microsoft, have lobbied hard to twist those laws out of shape. Now, the vast power imbalance between rich corporations and poor artists (particularly when negotiating) allows the corporations to stripmine

What is the nature of ‘art’? Is a work of art a commodity with a money value, to be bought and sold like a potato, or is it a gift on which no real price can be placed, to be freely exchanged?"

– Margaret Atwood (in her introduction to Lewis Hyde’s superb book, The Gift)

You are Microsoft lawyers: you are about as far inside the machine, inside the system, as a human being can get. And as Joseph Campbell said, “Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?”

You can do this for free, and read everything for free, because I want to continue to live in a gift economy, if possible. I like it; I prefer giving my art away to selling it; it serves the ideas better because they reach more people, and it makes  me  feel better. Happier; freer.