To Whom Does Art Belong?

I know, I swear up and down that I'm not simply going to link to other sites and comment, but I just keep seeing things which inspire commentary, and lord knows I'm not going to comment on the other site, for reasons of my own sanity. In this case, I really don't want to talk about the news item so much as I want to talk about a bit of philosophical tripe which the Internet seems to be inspiring in people.

The relevant article is here.

The relevant text is:

"[The National Portrait Gallery] honestly think the paintings belong to them rather than to us," [Wikipedia volunteer David Gerard] wrote.

That attitude pretty much typifies the attitude of a lot of people on the Internet. Everyone believes that content, data, art, what have you, belongs to the public, and only the public should own it or profit from it. I confess that this point of view has its moments of seduction: for instance, Star Wars ("Free Hat! Free Hat!"), or those times when you really want to consume some form of data for free, but it's not currently free.

But sadly, David Gerard is wrong. The paintings do belong to them rather than us. Someone owns those paintings, whether it be the gallery or some other person who has loaned their paintings to the gallery. The image that the artist created may be locked in our collective artistic memories, never to be returned, but the physical canvas is owned by someone. It's not that hard a concept to understand.

Content isn't free. I'm not sure it ever should be. There are, as I said, tempting moments when I thing, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if everything was free," but that's just my inner thief talking. If anything, artists should retain more ownership of their works than they currently do. If said artists want to relinquish ownership to the public and make those things free, that's their business. But just because the artist no longer owns their art, that doesn't mean that it's free or that no one owns it.

These are the facts of the matter. Wikipedia volunteers can believe anything they like, but the facts are that the paintings are owned by someone, and it's not "the people." That someone may, for whatever reason (goodness of heart or money-grubbing capitalism), have provided these paintings to be viewed by people, but that doesn't change the ownership of the paintings, just as going to see a movie in the theater doesn't make one part-owner of that movie, or reading a book in the library doesn't make one part-copyright-holder of that text. Nothing is free. Either you pay for it directly or indirectly.

We do not live in a Utopian paradise of free data and share-and-share-alike, where everything is open-source and there is no world hunger. We don't. Get over yourselves.