Why copyright and cash bad for creativity

[Susan Stephenson, the Book Chook]

There's an interesting article over at The Conversation, by Dan Hunter, Dean of Swinburne Law School at Swinburne University of Technology. Lots to think about and discuss with students! 

"Imagine you were asked to write a law that encouraged creativity. What would it look like? Whatever your answer, it’s pretty clear that it wouldn’t look like copyright.

Which is weird, right? Because copyright is supposed to be the law that spurs creativity. The problem, it turns out, is that the central features of copyright are directly opposed to the things that support creativity.

Creativity is a tricky thing to understand, and we have very little insight into what animates the creative spark and why some people are more creative than others.

But one thing we do know about creativity is that a really good way to make people less creative, is to pay them. A series of studies by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan Teresa Amabile, and others, have shown that primary school kids don’t learn to read if they’re paid to, artists produce their worst work when they’re commissioned to produce it, and people get worse at solving puzzles if you reward them for successful solutions." Read more here. 

[Michele Vogt-Schuller]

This is very interesting and is actually one of the results of capitalism.

Lawrence Lessig http://www.lessig.org/ and Dan Pink http://www.danpink.com/2009/07/money-cant-buy-you-performance/ have written extensively about this; Lessig more on IP and copyright, and Pink on motivation.

Money is indeed a false measurement - in education that is really true!

Thanks for a very interesting post!