Seth Godin On “Protecting The Work”
Protecting creative output is about much more than copyright and trademarks. Digital tools have made creation and distribution possible for everyone; and collaboration, mashups and content repositioning are essential to the modern creative landscape. In the digital age, "protecting the work" is more about stewardship – an almost sacred skill that creatives, as well as the managers, agents, publishers, publicists and labels who serve them need to take seriously. In a short essay, Seth Godin wrote about Roman Coppala's role in protecting the work of his filmmaker sister Sophie:
"In describing the role her brother played in producing one of her movies, Sofia Coppola said, 'he protected the film.'
As a producer, Roman saw his role as keeping the crew small, the project moving, the choices open so that Sofia could do her work. He protected the movie so that she could make it.
'Too often, artists and marketers and designers forget to protect their work from those that might try to improve it.
There are two difficulties I see here for indie artists.
How to learn to do this before you have someone who can do it for you.
How not to let this be an excuse for one’s ego to override common sense.
When I was making performance work, which I may do again one day, I learned to do the first much more quickly than I learned to do the second. Looking back, I can see how I sometimes undermined my work due to my lack of understanding of how to deal with the needs of the media.
I have a lot of aging, broke artist friends whose distaste for the word “business” often draws on protecting the work to maintain a naive, unproductive stance and the ones that didn’t find somebody else to do it are making a lot less work than they used to.
Most of them aren’t in music but I do point my musician friends to this blog so that they’ll start wrapping their hands around business issues.
But I can’t make them read it!