I like to read history, including historical fiction, so I was happy when a friend turned me on to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire, a four-volume-and-counting pastiche of Medieval Europe/Roman Frontier/Golden Horde, with a soupcon of magic and a few dragons thrown in, centered on sympathetic good/bad characters and realistically murky political intrigue.

HBO is turning the work into a series, starting in April 2011, and, judging by the preview, the studio has done the job proud, pitch-perfect in set design and overall ambience and with casting that meshes beautifully with the author’s vision.  I look forward to several years of glorious entertainment. (At least, I will if Martin gets off the movie set and back to writing the remaining volumes — ya hear that, George?)

The question of the day is, how would this artistic achievement be possible without intellectual property rights? The answer is that it would not. HBO is able to produce such works only because it can sell subscriptions, and if you don’t pay then you don’t watch. If pirate websites are able to pick up the shows as quickly as they are cabled and rebroadcast them for free, then HBO’s business model is no longer possible and we simply will not have such creations.

To the argument that advertising is an adequate funding base, the response is empirical — it does not happen. No ad-based network has ever come close to HBO at its best.  Besides, without property rights, then anyone could steal the work and attach ads to it, so there would be no mechanism to channel even the ad money back into production values.

Property rights are equally important to the original creation. Martin can write because people pay for his books, which means he can sit in Santa Fe and invent worlds. Leave aside the argument that the creative impulse is so strong that he would write even without payment — if Martin had to earn a living in some other way, then he would not have the time, energy, or focus to write such a monumental work.

The main point here is that the people who tell me that I as a consumer have an interest opposed to the interests of Martin and HBO are simply wrong. My interest is that such works be produced, preferably in profusion, and that the creators put a price on them so I can choose which ones I will spend money on.  My interest is not that the works be free, given that this would make it difficult for creators. I am not aided by a rule that creative works would be free if there were any, but there are not because no one can invest the money and time to create them.

Nor am I concerned with bleats about “fair use” that assume that creations should exist so that idle students can do jokey mash-ups, and any property rights that interfere with mash-up culture must be eliminated, no matter what the cost to the basic creative system. I am interested in what Martin and the HBO people do with this imaginary world. If they want to allow fans to tinker with it, I don’t object, but I (in my role of consumer) do not want to see their rights to guard their creation whittled away a whit for the sake of a few mash-ups.

BTW – “Winter is coming” is a recurrent line from the books, which take place in a world where summer and winter last much longer than is the case in our world, and the events described take place as the long winter impends.

But the phrase is also a useful reminder that it is important to get intellectual property rights properly defined and protected in the Internet Age, or there will indeed be a winter in the production of creative content.

Image from Amazon.

Image from HBO.