Furries and the Art of Surviving in a Post-Copyright World

Let’s be realistic here: copyright is dead. At least, it’s dead in the sense of “the right to make copies.” Once a piece of media is digitized — be it textual, visual, audible, or interactive — copying it costs exactly zero dollars (or -45,000 euros at the current exchange rate). Because of this, the perception of art not as a product but as information is rapidly reentering the collective human psyche after about 100 years of technical difficulties.

So this means artists who hope to make a living will now have to rethink their business models, because basing your livelihood on the assumption that all people will pay you for the privilege of merely experiencing your work is on par with Young Earth creationism in la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you factor. But never fear, artistic community, because a ton of niche nerd fandoms have come to terms with that assumption since the heyday of Usenet (because many of them probably had a hand in inventing it). They all operate with similar conventions, but because everything is better with cartoon purple foxes, the example I will explain is the furry subculture.

One of the major cornerstones of furry interest is the visual artwork. Artists draw and paint all sorts of anthropomorphic animal characters, and many of the popular ones make good money selling prints of their work at conventions. The same goes for comic book creators and, more recently, novel authors. While these works sell to adoring fans, much of them are also freely available to view online. But the real money, especially for less universally known artists, is in the sales of commissions. Another cornerstone of furry interest is the “fursona,” an animal character to represent oneself. Many furries would like pictures of “themselves,” and pay artists to do this for them. Once the commissions are finished, the commissioner and artist display them prominently all over the Internet.

Deconstruct this market, and an interesting theory emerges. Artists create works on their own time, and this attracts fans. Many of these fans buy physical copies of the art to show their support. Some others have an idea for a particular work of art they’d like to see produced, and commission the artist to do so. Once this artwork is finished, it is displayed both for the pleasure of the commissioner and everyone else who wants to see it.

These ideas can be scaled up and applied to many other situations. Musicians are having a lot of success with using recordings to attract fans who’ll support their work and come to concerts, and some are doing pretty well with taking commissions. That’s hardly surprising, as Mozart and Beethoven worked in a similar fashion. But it’s not such a stretch to see narrative and interactive media succeeding in a similar fashion. How many times have people in the world thought, “I wish someone would make a movie about [this]“, or “I wish there was a video game where you could [do this]“? Films and games are often larger projects than the budget of a single fan can finance, but Gabe Newell of Valve already thinks a bunch of interested fans could fund a game.

It’s not clear if that would work in our current understanding of the world. Would large projects like films and video games still be able to make a profit if they were funded by fans and then released into the wild, depending on the goodwill of more fans to pay for them after the fact?

To be honest, I hope not. I really hope that the financial implications of producing artwork changes so radically that it no longer makes sense for business to be involved. That’s not to say I hope artists will be unable to support themselves; after all, there’s a big difference in making a living and making a profit. As evidenced by most of what comes out of Hollywood and the LA music industry, “content creators” motivated by profit are generally hacks. Artists motivated by living — the world around them, their lives inspiring their art — are the ones who actually produce things that are worthwhile.

That’s what one sees in these artists who draw animal people. They love and care about what they do, and the money is a side benefit. Few of them get particularly rich from what they do, but that doesn’t matter. It’s this kind of situation that reminds me, file-sharing is not killing music, movies, video games, or anything. It’s killing the artistic cancer that is the copyright industry.

In other words, if you’re not going to draw pictures, write music, make movies, or develop games because there’s no money in it, good. You have the wrong attitude.

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