Last night all my kids had a spontaneous Art Time. Gleek and Patches were coloring. Link started drawing a comic full of Nintendo characters. When bedtime came, they left their art stuff out. Art Time continued this morning. But it was a little more conflict filled this time. Link finished his comic and wanted to show it to me. Patches wanted to see too, but Link declared that Patches couldn’t see until the comic was in a book. Patches wailed. He wanted to see his brother’s cool work. Link scowled, he wanted to maintain his right to decide who gets to look at his work. I attempted to negotiate a veiwing for Patches while honoring Link’s copyright. In the end, Patches was allowed to view when I was.
This is not the first copyright issue I’ve had to negotiate. Yesterday it was Gleek and Kiki.
Kiki has been drawing a lot lately. She’s been experimenting with Anime style art. Kiki is so pleased with her new style that she decided to get rid of some of her old work. She “got rid of it” by leaving the old drawings strewn across the front room floor. They sat there for several days. Then yesterday I got tired of the drawings being on the floor and asked Kiki if they were important or garbage. Kiki declared them to be garbage and began to clean them up. This would have been fine except Gleek heard the exchange. In Gleek’s eyes the drawings were beautiful and it was a tragedy that they were all going into the trash. Gleek tried to grab them, Kiki grabbed them faster. Kiki insisted that the drawings go into the trash. She didn’t want to see them laying around. Then there was crying.
I waded in and tried to argue with Kiki. It seemed spiteful to me that Kiki would rather throw the pictures away an let her little sister cry than to just let her sister have the pictures. It was definitely a power play on Kiki’s part. She was asserting her right to decide what happens to her art. In this house we are big fans of intellectual property rights. It felt wrong for me to just declare that Kiki had to give the pictures to Gleek. I leaned hard on Kiki to see if she would cave in. She would not. Gleek cried some more. Then I remembered that Kiki is attempting to save money to buy copic markers. I negotiated a deal where Gleek bought the pictures from Kiki. After that everyone was happy.
I’ve since made clear to Kiki that if she leaves pictures laying on the floor, that constitues a forfeiture of rights to those pictures. They enter the public domain and are available to anyone who wishes to pick them up. Print outs made from scanned pictures that Kiki has drawn will also have to be discussed. Kiki thinks that the other kids should pay her a nickel every time they print out a picture that she has drawn. So we’re going to have to discuss “fair use” and “duplication rights.”
It is amazing to see my kids starting to develop ethics about these things at such a young age. I suppose it is inevitable considering how we pay our bills. I guess I just didn’t expect to have to be judge and jury over intellectual property rights as well as physical ones .
I’m pretty impressed at the sophistication of some of the arguments going on here. (Or, conversely, it shows how childish copyright fights can be. A little bit of both, I suspect.)
I’m reminded of how Claude Monet had a habit of taking a bunch of paintings that he considered to be substandard out into his back yard and burning them.
We get a lot of this in our house too, and it really is all about power, and very little about property or rights. All three of the older boys draw, one in particular draws all the time. Frequently one of them will clean out their paper drawer and throw stuff out, then the fun begins because one of the others comes along and fishes something out of the trash.
It seems clear that the one who threw the drawing away forfeited all right to it, but they don’t see it that way.
“Hey! That’s mine, give it to me!”
“No it isn’t, it was in the trash!”
“It’s still mine, give it to me!” etc. etc.
The oldest’s solution to this is to destroy ANYTHING once he is done with it (creations, drawings, toys, clothing, whatever), specifically so that no one else can have it. This is a problem, since he is the oldest and therefore much of his old stuff can and should be re-used. We have talked to him about this, but once he has (yet again) destroyed something, it is pretty much too late.
The only exception to his scorched earth policy is when he gives something away specifically. Unfortunately, that usually is also a power-play since he will give something to a brother who doesn’t really want it to spite the one who does, and if that brother then tries to pass it on to the one who wants it . . . more fireworks. Power, what fun.
Sigh.
Just make sure you teach them the Fair Use doctrine too… 😉