Does #SOPA and its like promise a world without art?

Louis quite rightly defines the forked paths ahead of us thus:

So the question is this:

* A lifetime of licenses routinized into the cost of living, and invisible in the enormous harm such a licensed life would put in play if only by suturing close the possibilities of having it some other way; or

* A lifetime open to innovation, collaboration, production unencircumscribed by closed licenses; markets would be built and profits made on the merit of one’s work and not on the right to work itself.

It seems to me that with the traditional content industries' massive desire to make copyright a tool for guaranteeing enormous cashflow without further creative effort - that is to say, without further artistic creative effort (for marketing tricks and discourses these moguls will always value and understand) - we are running the serious risk in our Western civilisations (and wherever their values manage to prevail) of destroying the very right to artistic creation itself.

Just imagine if versions of SOPA and PIPA finally get through, sanctioning the right of one discourse and society - the US capitalist cash-cow industrial model - to decide who sees what, where and when, as well as for how much and how often.  With the vast quantities out there of already existing and licensed content, who needs new ground-breaking applecart-upturning ways of looking at the world?

The grand paradox of the traditional content industries since time immemorial (and certainly since Hollywood's inception) has been how they required of their artists an anti-artistic series of behaviours.  Thus it is we could argue that finally working out how to censor the Internet's flow and exchange of information is nothing more nor less than an easy but unhappy return to a previous age: a Hays Code for our time.

It may be that history will teach us that the progress we thought was being achieved via virtual freedoms was actually a simple parenthesis between the instincts of the 1930s and the beginning of this fearful 21st century, where an openness to new ideas - and an inability to properly sustain the existing order - are taken as signs of a dangerous unpredictability which could serve to shake the very foundations of our societies, instead of a source of brilliant imagination and game-changing thought which - to the benefit of us all - could totally alter our future socioeconomic growth and development.

Proprietary cash cows which see creativity mainly in terms of repackaging and marketing existing material - or fleet-of-foot online and offline nexuses of real artistic endeavour?  That is the crossroads we find ourselves at.  And the stakes are far higher than simply a matter of whether the traditional content industries manage to reimpose far more forcefully a tired business model which - over the last decade - was clearly losing traction. 

I would, in fact, posit that we run the risk of losing the very environments, conditions, instincts and impulses which would allow for future art itself - or, at least, future art as we have understood the concept to date.

A world without art then? 

Or, at least, a world with only a marketable, packageable and securely licensable history of art - but no possibility any more of a confident future of mould-breaking innovation?

One step too far in my train of thought?  It might all be closer than you think ...