On the ethics of sharing...

As I explore my options in regards to how to best go about developing and promoting my first work, I find my interests, and my somewhat iconoclastic nature, naturally drawn to the forefront of debates about copyright and intellectual property.  In an odd way, it's somewhat of a natural outgrowth from my undergraduate research on rhetoric surrounding the incorporation of the Human Genome Project's results into commercial products.  Of course, now that I am in the position of authoring my own works, I find myself at a crossroads.  Do I endorse the traditional route and throw my work out to the world, hoping against hope, like Hemingway's Old Man, that someone will bite, or do I involve the world in my work to create something that is no longer entirely mine?

I suppose every artist fancies himself the God of his own world at some point--even Tolkien could not resist proclaiming the artist as "the little maker"--yet there comes a time when he must surrender his desire for demiurge-status and realize that for his work to truly thrive, it must grow beyond the boundaries of his own conception.  In a sense, creation is a process of inverse navel gazing, in which the artist, by sheer dint of look through himself, discovers the world beyond him.  The intensity of this process, its relentless nature, collapses all that he is into a point--a singularity, if you will--which, due to its own density must either collapse upon itself or explode outward indefinitely.  Thus, regardless of whether he claims ultimate authority of the work, there exists the notion that the artist is bound to his creation. 

Within such a perspective, reluctance to share is a natural outgrowth of the process.  Surrendering control of even a small part of the work is tantamount to giving a part of oneself away, and, as we have seen with organ donation cards, that's frequently a hard sell.  Yet I wonder what is truly lost?

As I chew over the complexities of this issue, I will continue to keep you all informed about my thoughts, as well as my final decision.  In the meantime, here are some things to mull over:

• Creative Commons: a non-profit organization devoted to establishing a better way of sharing.
  
• Cory Doctorow's Bio: co-editor of the blog BoingBoing and author of three novels available under the Creative commons license.
• WIPO: the World Intellectual Property Organization, an agency of the United Nations.  Established to promote a comprehensive system for  international IP rights.