It is said that the financial value of intellectual property will continue to fall towards zero. The copyrights in words and music will come to have no monetary value as people are able to access these goods ever more easily and cheaply. That there will be more written material and more recorded music around than ever before will compound the situation.

Maybe that should be brought on in the hope that culture will still require and admire the work of artists and writers such that it will come up with alternative methods of supporting them. Perhaps then art could be taken out the commodity loop so that it is seen less like a material item sold alongside washing machines and computers. If this were to happen then maybe public funds and private subsidy would become the main sources of art finance. This would lead to fewer opportunities for creatives, yes, but that might not be such a bad thing. A move away from the dubious ‘anything goes/anyone can’ situation that resides currently might in the longer term be good for the quality aspect which is required for art to do what it needs to do.

The invasion of the commercial market into virtually all areas of life such that it is becoming the measure of everything is ultimately bad for essential artistic work. It’s time to look at better possibilities for the production and the funding of the arts away from the dominant concerns of business. The rapid diminishing of the economic worth of intellectual property might actually be a help.

And while I’m here. I don’t like the term ‘intellectual property’? I don’t like that it is so loaded with the implication that creative thoughts, ideas and works are property, stuff to be traded, owned or consumed. Do we have to convert absolutely everything to a commodity before it can be made sense of?