Why I am running for Senate, an illustration for swing dancers

To my swing-dancing friends, who make up the bulk of my personal friends, here is an illustration of "Free Culture", the single issue I am running for U.S. Senate on:

You make a video of a swing routine and post it online. Perhaps it is a routine you've spent months choreographing and practicing, or perhaps it was one of those magical moments of an improvised dance where everything "just clicked", and you danced awesome. You post the video online so others may enjoy it, others may learn from it, others may be inspired by it.

After posting the video, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) contacts you about the copyright infringement of the song that is playing to your dance. Normally, they just ask you to take it down, but perhaps the RIAA is feeling particularly vindictive today, or they want to make an example of you (like they did with Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas), so they proceed directly to a lawsuit. They sue you for the legal maximum of $150,000 in damages for "willful copyright infringement". Is that right?

You could think about defending yourself, perhaps saying that your video is protected by "fair use", but do you really have the tens of thousands of legal fees it will cost to fight the RIAA in court? Can you risk the up to $150,000 judgment if you lose?

You might mute the audio track, hoping to avoid direct confrontation with the RIAA. But that might be removing an essential part of your dance -- maybe the reason your dance is awesome is not because of any particularly awesome moves, but because you've put together standard moves in a way that "goes" with the music in a particularly awesome way.

But here is where things get even crazier: Even with the audio muted, the video your choreography, being based on copyrighted music, is a "derivative work", and copyright law protects the copyright owner against unlicensed derivative works. (This is why a movie must buy the rights to a book.) Even with the audio muted, you could still be sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement, again for up to $150,000.

Once again, you could think about fighting in court. To my limited knowledge, nobody's ever been successfully sued for "derivative work" copyright infringement for the video of a dance to music. Maybe there's a provision in the law, or some a previous court case which established precedent. But once again, can you afford the thousands of dollars of legal costs to fight off the RIAA?

So it looks like, if you really don't want to risk getting sued and losing tens of thousands of dollars whether you win or lose, it's better not to post the video of your dance online at all. Now the question is, is the world a better place because fear of the RIAA has thwarted you from sharing the video your dance?

Of course, this has been a parable. The moral of the story is, the power and extent of intellectual property owners has grown tremendously (historically) in recent years, so much so now that it is stifling creativity and squashing innovation, the two greatest forces for good and progress in human civilization. The fear and uncertainty, the worry of being sued, is causing people to be cautious about their creativity, choosing not to share, choosing not to build.

But let's end this story on a bright note. What happens when culture is instead allowed to be free? Let's take a look at jazz.

Probably by tradition, and because the RIAA did not exist in the early days of jazz, musicians in jazz were free to build upon the works of other jazz musicians and composers. And of course swing dance, which co-evolved with jazz, dancers were free to copy, build upon, and develop old and new swing moves. Dance can be copyrighted, but they didn't. Where would Lindy Hop be today if there were a copyright on the swing-out, and anyone who performed it had to negotiate a license with the creator of the move? Where would swing dance be today if every swing band had to negotiate a "derivative work" copyright license for every familiar "standard" they performed? Or wanting to avoid extortion by the copyright owner, every band had to have a completely different repertoire, never "covering" another song with their interpretation?

The "free culture" of jazz, the ability to share and build upon other's creativity, has given us a live an active swing dance community, a community I am thankful to be a part of, given me so many friends, and something I do for fun sometimes every night of the week.