With the shift from "stuff" to "intellectual property" we are seeing a new type of law emerge. It started with changes to the traditional copyright concept, first by extending it to things other than the written word and then by lengthening its duration beyond what anyone had originally contemplated.

In addition the control of copyrighted material has been extended, notwithstanding the existence of the concept of fair use. Snippets of music that appear in other's music must now be cleared for use and paid for. Even images of things in public spaces, like skyscrapers, are demanding payment if the image features in a movie.

Right now we are in the midst of what may turn out to be an epic battle between publishers, authors and Google over the use of technically copyrighted material, but where the holder can no longer be found. These are called "orphan" works and Google wants to sell access to them, even though they don't have any rights, just because they took the time to digitize them. The also want an exclusive right to offer this service. This is an entirely new concept, privatizing something in the public domain.

I want to discuss a different aspect of the "ownership" issue. That is where the object itself is unique, such as a painting or sculpture. Ordinarily once such an item is sold the artist loses all rights to it. Some have made agreements concerning subsequent display of the item for commercial purposes (such as in a book). In other words they want to control the "content", but not the item itself.

A more interesting issue is what happens to the work when the original buyer choses to resell it? Typically, for a well-known artist, the price obtained may be much higher than the original buyer paid. The gain in value goes to the owner, not to the artist.

I'd like to propose a formal change to this concept of "ownership". In any future sales the artist gets a certain percentage of the gains realized. Why shouldn't the creator benefit from his work the same as an author? If a book suddenly becomes popular after it is published, the author benefits from the royalties from the additional sale.

I would extend this right to share in the gain indefinitely into the future, even after the original artist is dead. Collectors buy antiquities that are the cultural heritage of the society they come from, but the society doesn't benefit. Many times these are sold illegally so only the thieves make any money from the transaction. Several countries are now demanding that museums return items obtained under such questionable circumstances, especially those obtained during the heyday of colonialism.

In my scheme, when there is no direct line to the original artist, the royalty from the resale would go to a fund that is used to promote the arts and/or conserve other historical artifacts.

The system wouldn't be perfect, but music rights are collected by groups such as ASCAP and BMI and doled out according to a sampling scheme. Small private sales wouldn't be tracked, but the bigger sales go through auction houses or other public sales and keeping track wold be simple. Such places already keep databases of who owned various items and how much they have sold for over the years. Thus, those items which bring in the most money would be included in the plan. If a private seller avoided the scheme and then the person he sold it to later wanted to sell it at an auction, the lack of proof that the royalty had been paid could be used to collect the prior missed amount.

Artists should profit from their work, whenever anyone else does, it seems only fair. If they hadn't created it to start with there would be nothing to sell.

This is a follow on to my prior essay The slow work movement

I thought I'd relate some of my personal experiences with semi-custom makers as examples of what has been practical in the past. I invite others to add their own stories. In no particular order.

Food

We need to bring some nibbles to a memorial service for a couple of old friends who died recently. So we went into the local bakery and discussed choices with the baker and then ordered the needed amount of small pastries to be ready for pickup on Saturday. He even gave us an extra dozen for "free".

Last Christmas I wanted a goose. This is no longer a popular choice around here, most stores only carry turkey and ham in quantity. We went into the local butcher shop and they ordered one for us in time for the holiday. On another occasion I wanted a duck and my daughter, who lives in a slightly less populated suburb than I do, went to the local farmer who had one already prepared. If he hadn't found one in his refrigerator he said it would be ready in an hour or so!

Wood

At one time I was an avid recorder player (vertical wooden flute) and ordered two different models from a well-known English maker. It took 18 months until they finished the order. One of them needed a bit of modification, so I took it with me on a trip to England and stopped at the workshop to drop it off. I discovered why there was such a long backlog. A worker was hand fitting two sections together. He chalked up one part fitted them and looked to see where the chalk had rubbed off, then took some sandpaper and made an infinitesimal change. This was repeated dozens of times. The same firm makes plastic injection molded instruments by the thousands. The handmade ones sell for about 500 times the plastic ones. This illustrates the two extremes.

I used to make some of my own furniture. At the time there was an old family business in the Bronx that catered to woodworkers (I just looked them up and they seem to have moved to Florida and gone web-based). So I drove there (only about 15 miles) and went through their lumber yard and picked out some beautiful pieces of walnut and mahogany for my projects. They also had many exotic hardwoods, but those were too rich for my budget. Home centers still sell furniture grade lumber, but only oak, maple and pine and only in narrow widths. I did buy some veneer from them on other occasions and then getting nicely matched pieces is even more important. I wish I could say my veneering efforts matched the quality of the supplies, but this was one of my failures... Some things really required expertise and specialized equipment.

Clothing

The women in my family are all into the fabric arts, so I've been able to "commission" several hand knit sweaters and quilts. Of course sometimes they make what they want as a gift and that's nice too. Being surprised has its rewards as well. They make more than we all can use and give away a steady supply as gifts to all the new babies that seem to be appearing in our circle. I've never heard of a single recipient (the parents, if not the babies) who wasn't thrilled.

Media

Even though I've tried to focus on the practical (recorders being the exception), much of what we have around the house that is handmade falls into the "arts and crafts" category. So we have several ceramic pots and sculptures made by friends as well as various paintings and prints bought from the artists themselves.

Recently I decided to package up the essays on my web site into a book I could give to people. I found, what can be seen as the prototype of my new semi-custom enterprise model - a demand publisher. Using modern technology this firm can take my formatted electronic file and produce a single copy of a hardbound book for a price similar to what one would pay in a store. This will be a boon to poets and novelists who will no longer have to order hundreds of copies from a printer and then fill up their basement with them while they try to sell them over time. Multiple copies cost the same as the single copy price, unless one wants to buy in the range of conventional publishing in which case prices get cheaper. The only limitations on what I could do concerned the actual page size. This is restricted to about a dozen of the most common formats. Even commercial printers impose such restrictions in most cases.

Future

Technology already exists (and is being used) to create custom fabric designs using something similar to inkjet printing. With this capability one will be able to design one's own fabric and order enough for a single garment or so, just as I have done with my book.

Modern sewing machines already have computerized software that will accept scanned in pictures and will generate embroidery patterns that they can execute. I expect to see more decorated clothing using this capability as prices for the machines come down. Perhaps there will even be a rise in home clothing making, especially as budgets get tight. A computer capability that will allow printing out of a pattern for cutting the pieces of a garment to measure would complete the process and remove the need for the skill to resize commercially obtained patterns.

I think there is similar technology available for decorating pottery, which would allow for custom designed dinnerware. I know there are inkjet printers for putting edible pictures made of icing on cakes, so why not for ceramic glazes? Many communities already offer ceramics classes and thus have the appropriate firing equipment.

I've just heard of a company that is planning to decentralize car assembly and do away with huge factories. With standardized parts one could mix and match and get exactly what one wants in a vehicle. We will see if his idea turns out to be practical.

Look around your environment and see how little of it exists that isn't mass produced. We may be cogs in the big machine of modern life, but we should be able to put some of our own preferences into our individual environment. We may be cogs, but at least we can be brightly colored ones.

Let's hear your stories, or ideas for a new age of responsiveness.

In an earlier article I argued for a lifestyle which is less based upon material possessions and more focused on getting joy out of life.

Too Many People, Too Little Work

Suggesting that people work less is fine, but people still need to do some work in order to live. The question is what sort?

Historical Work Patterns

Modern society has altered the traditional division of labor which consisted of a large peasant class, a very small landowning class, and a modest sized merchant class. As mechanization improved, the number needed for tilling the land decreased, while a new class of factory workers emerged which absorbed much of the displaced workforce. This was not a smooth transition, a lot of excess labor was forced to emigrate, especially from Europe to the New World and Australia. Now that these areas have filled up, displaced workers in other regions have been forced into more extreme situations. The biggest, ongoing, trend is from the countryside in Africa and Asia and into the cities. They don't find the factory or entrepreneurial jobs as rewarding as the earlier migrants did. Many end up in extreme poverty with minimal social services living in fringe shanty towns.

The advanced societies are now moving away from almost all agricultural (the US employs about 2% of the working population in this area), and the mass-production factory model, which was the backbone of the growth of the middle class during the 20th Century, is also going into decline. The boosters of the brighter tomorrow dream say that "service" jobs will replace the traditional employment opportunities. Service jobs, however, fall into two broad categories. I'll call them labor substitution and middlemen. A typical modern example of labor substitution:

A woman with children enters the labor force and then spends most of her salary paying another woman to take care of her kids. Or she works so late that she has to buy prepared foods on the way home to serve her family. The food preparer substituted for the traditional home role. I'm not saying that this a good or bad development, just that it has become increasingly common as the percentage of women in the workforce continues to rise. Many women resented being forced into a role of "housewife" when they had ambitions of their own. More options can only be a positive development. Other labor substitutions have grown without much notice, at one time only the barber and the bread baker were common labor substitution professions. The first because it needed a certain degree of skill and the second because many poor families didn't have ovens. Now we have people to do our shopping for us, wrap our packages, make us a cup of coffee and give us financial and "lifestyle" advice.

The other category of service job is the creation of layer upon layer of intermediaries. I don't need to enumerate them, but a typical firm will now have training, human resources,payroll, accounting, food service and cleaning all delegated to specialized firms. The argument is that a specialized firm can be more efficient than a company doing everything for its self. In limited cases this may be true, but the middlemen need to make a profit too and it is not clear that the service actually ends up cheaper as a result.

In an earlier age a banker's skill lay in being able to assess the risk of making a loan. Now bankers hire risk analysis firms, risk insurance firms, management firms, credit rating agencies, appraisers, etc. in an almost endless progression of new services. These new services don't add new value to the ultimate transaction. A loan gets made or it doesn't, but they do keep lots of people employed. I've maintained that this is an entirely proper social organization for a society to adopt, as long as what is being done is agreed to by the citizenry explicitly.

The legislators have no trouble making such an argument when it comes to military spending. They explicitly cite the number of jobs that will be created by making death machines. Right now, in the US, a similar argument is being made for keeping the huge middleman structure of the health services sector. There are about six million in the "Healthcare Practitioner and Technical Occupations" listing kept by the US Department of Labor, but the workforce in the overall field is about 16 million. In other words, about half of all jobs are middlemen. If a society wants to deliberately provide make-work jobs, then that's fine as long as everyone understands what is the goal. The Japanese provide support for small plot rice farmers by keeping imports at a disadvantage. Everyone pays a bit more, but these marginally economic farmers are kept on their land and employed. The expense is seen as being socially worthwhile.

To summarize: Agriculture and factory work are in decline, "service" industries are on the increase, but many of the new jobs are really make-work tasks or labor substitution. The push toward labor substitution is also a result of the way the GDP is calculated. Getting back to my working mother case, when she stays home, her work does not contribute to the GDP, but if she hires someone else to do the tasks, then both transactions are counted. This anomaly is used as a way to shape public policy, even if the planners may not realize it.

Slow Work

A few years ago a "slow food" movement started. People were supposed to cook for themselves and take time to enjoy the entire process of preparation and eating. In addition raising food locally or buying from small farmers rather than big industrialized operations was seen as a desirable end. By analogy I'm coining the term "slow work", which I'll define in a moment.

Starting near the beginning of the 20th Century there was a revulsion to the increasingly dehumanized factory system and in both Britain and the US there arose movements dedicated to recreating the traditional hand crafts. Usually this is called the "Arts and Crafts" movement. Many of the creations of these small shops and skilled workman now command huge prices, but the movement was always aimed at the elite.

During the 1960's there was a second wave with many "hippies" moving to Vermont and other rural areas and setting up furniture, pottery and jewelry operations. Some even survive to this day. Even food preparation became part of the movement with bakers and other shops offering alternatives to mass-produced food.

My "slow food" movement is an attempt to extend this beyond the elite that have been its mainstay so far. The one thing that people can't really buy these days is individually made items. Almost everything we buy is mass-produced. Advertisers go to great lengths to make people identify with products and make them think that this defines their individuality, but in truth it is just the opposite. The "unique" sweater that you buy in a shop may only be carried in a dozen or so copies, but it is likely that it is in hundreds of other shops elsewhere. The "uniqueness" is an illusion.

My proposal is to shift away from mass production for much of what we buy. Certain items are now so complex or difficult to build that getting a hand-made one is impractical. How could a hand-made mobile phone even be created? On the other hand the Volvo model showed that autos could be made from start to finish by work teams rather than on an assembly line. With a bit of tweaking even such complex system as this could be individualized. The assembly team would do more that take predefined parts from the appropriate bins, but would have some say on what parts were incorporated, following a customer's desires. With modern computerized control systems, even one-off machined parts are feasible.

Other areas like clothing, furniture and home furnishings lend themselves to a non-factory model. What I'm suggesting is not the false "customization" provided by huge firms. For example Levy's Jeans offers custom fitted clothes, but all that changes is that the cutting machine is programmed with the customer's actual measurements. Everything else about the process is still the same. The objective is to get people out of the factories and into workshops where they are designers as well as builders. Of course, this will be less "efficient" than the one-size-fits-all mass production model. But the loss in efficiency is compensated by the increased need for employment. This is the social goal that I'm advocating. "Efficiency" fails to take in the total cost to a society of how things get done. Where is the cost of those not working factored in? Where is the loss of self worth from people on the fringes accounted? Just like the GDP distortion, failing to price life satisfaction skews priorities.

I've built a lot of the furniture in my home over the decades (including two harpsichords) and the feeling one gets from living with one's creations provides a lasting satisfaction that no mass produced item can match, regardless of how much we are told to the contrary. Living with items bought (or bartered) from people that you have met and discussed your needs with is also a source of pleasure. Not everything needs to be material output to fall into to my scheme. Farmer's markets show that people have the same feelings toward the breads, jellies and other items that are for sale. With a bit of thought this type of personalized labor can be extended to many other areas, including "services".

One pays more for the items one buys, but one gets more for the items that one sells. And if it takes months to make a harpsichord then someone trying to do this for a living will just make fewer and charge appropriately. The lessened income will reduce the mad rush toward excess materialism and the continual replacement of perfectly good items for newer ones in an attempt to make up for the lack of meaning in many people's lives.

That's my slow work movement. Enjoy the labor, see the results of your efforts and know that others appreciate getting things that aren't mass-produced and ill-suited to one's actual needs. Done right there will be enough honest work for all that need it.