In a Guardian article yesterday the writer said this: “In none of the arguments have I come across anyone who has properly explained why illegal file-sharing is OK. And if it's not OK, why should its effect on the market be welcomed with a wink?”

The argument be this: that art works are ultimately public goods. Copyright originally granted a short term arrangement whereby a work was protected allowing money to be made from it. It thereafter returned to the public to be enjoyed, altered, improved, copied, distributed et al. That is still the case but the protected periods are being extended into virtual perpetuity and as such go against the public spirit.

Why is file-sharing ok? Because it harks back to the original idea of art works as shared entities within an ethos of cultural progress. They were never intended to be commodities designed to make very small numbers of individuals massively wealthy.

Assuming copyright to be synonymous with ownership is misleading. You own your car until such times as you choose to dispose of it. Less so your copyable art. After it’s out there it’s in the shared space. Having it restricted by copyright was only ever supposed to be interim measure, one that is being increasingly rendered irrelevant by technology.

This is not of course to say that us artists should't be able to earn. It is to say that we will no longer be able to do so from selling distinct copies of our work. We are finding other ways as we always have.