It’s worth mentioning at the start here that if you’re a playwright, you’re not going to see much money from it. The average mid-career playwright makes under a thousand dollars a year in royalties. By comparison, when Terry Watanabe, president of the Oriental Trading Company in Omaha, Nebraska, recently went on a two-year gambling binge in Las Vegas, where he is reported to have lost about $100 million; that breaks down to about $5,700 per hour. So, if you were Terry, and you were in Vegas, and you were to spend your playwrighting money, you’d last a little over 10 minutes.

It’s little stories like this that give us perspective.

I mention this at the start, because I have started offering plays without demanding royalties, and I want to explain why. But it’s also worth noting that doing so is not that grand a philanthropic act. I don’t get that many productions per year -- one or two, sometimes from commissions, sometimes from plays I have written. This isn’t picking up or slowing down, and if these royalty free plays plays get produced, I think I can safely assume they are getting produced because they are royalty free, and would not have gotten produced otherwise. And even if they would have gotten produced, as I said, it’s not that much money.

There are reasons why I am doing this. The first is crassly commercial, and so I want to get it out of the way first. Now, it may seem counter-intuitive to give something away and call it a commercial act, but the truth is, if nobody has heard of you, they’re probably not going to do your play. Most plays that are produced in America are written by a handful of playwrights, and it is, in part, because they are well-known. But, then, their plays are relatively costly to produce, and there are theaters that are struggling just to make rent, much less pay several grand for the rights to produce a play. I do have plays that I charge a royalty to produce, and I’ll generally give smaller theaters a break, but I think it is worthwhile to have a selection of plays they don’t have to pay for at all. It’s not a new business model at all -- in the early days of rap music, aspiring artists would send out their friends to clubs and just give away cassette tapes with their music on it. It’s a tried and true method of developing an audience, and playwrights are hard-pressed to develop their own audience when nobody is producing their plays. I don’t know that I will get many productions as a result of this, but I hope to -- it’s an experiment in marketing my own plays.

But that’s not the only reason I do it, and the second reason is, for me, the more important one. The truth is, most of the art and culture I have consumed in my life has come to me nearly free, or I have traded for it. I grew up listening to the radio, and watching movies on late-night television, and now I listen to music on the Internet and watch movies on Hulu. I’ve always made a lot of use of the library, checking out books and music, free of charge. And I’ve been an audience to other culture that in no way directly benefited the original artist -- I bought, and buy, books and records used. When I was younger and poorer, I would volunteer at theaters in order to see plays for free; when I was older, I got work as a critic, in part because I didn’t have to pay to see theater -- I have yet to make enough of an income to pay for the cost of all the tickets I got for free.

Now, I know there is an economy behind all these things, and money flowed in one way or another, from commercials, or from tax money, or wherever. That’s not the point, however -- in each of those instances, the cost of this culture was collectively paid for, or was indirect; however it got paid for, it wasn’t paid by money coming out of my own pocket.

And I’m not unique in this. We’re all products of a world in which there is enormous and effectively free access to culture. There’s a vast well of culture out there, and we only have to directly pay for a fraction of it, and only a sliver of what we pay gets back to the original artists.

I think of that well as a debt. I have drawn from it, in some cases even borrowing from it for my own writing. Minstrel Show, as an example, makes use of actual prison songs, while Mad About the Boy! has a series of musical numbers lip-synced to now-public-domain gay-themed novelty records from the 1960s.

If I am going to draw from that well, I feel the least I can do is pay something back in. I’m not losing money when I offer some of my scripts royalty free; I am, instead, repaying a debt. And it’s a debt that we’re increasingly losing access to. When copyright laws were first put into place in the United States, they lasted 14-years, with the possibility of renewing another 14. Now copyright lasts for the entire life of the creator, plus 70 years. Additionally, there was a time when works could be orphaned if their owner didn’t maintain their copyright; this is no longer the case, which means that literally millions of pieces that no longer have any economic value nonetheless will be kept out of the public domain until long after we’re dead.

This wouldn’t be a problem if every piece of art was sui generis -- if we were all extraordinary originals, creating works that borrowed from no previous work and will never be attempted again. But we aren’t. Instead, we create works that are often an iteration of existing work -- ours is just the latest version of a cultural tradition that dates back millenia. Further, there is a lot of new art that is created by remixing elements, or borrowing completely from, existing art. An obvious example is hip hop, which wouldn’t exist but for the fact that it was possible to borrow beats and breaks off of existing albums. But examples of this can be found everywhere -- Shakespeare borrowed heavily from earlier stories, as did Brecht, as did Walt Disney. Arguably, Disney wouldn’t even exist without the public domain: Their first animated feature length film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was based on a public domain story by the Brothers Grimm. And Disney Studios has borrowed relentlessly from the public domain for the entire life of the corporation: In the past 10 years they have based at least five films on public domain sources. In the meanwhile, the copyright extension act that last extended copyright, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 was heavily lobbied by the Disney Studio, effectively keeping Mickey Mouse out of the public domain.

That just strikes me as selfish -- to profit from the public domain with one hand while controlling it, again for your own profits, with the other. It means that artists get to borrow from the well of culture throughout their life, but never have to pay back in until long after they’re dead. And this is done in the name of protecting the livelihood of artists, but what livelihood? The $1,000 I make per year as a playwright -- which, again, is fairly typical -- is not worth the loss of a robust public domain. No, what these copyright laws do is protect the profits of a few corporations and even fewer millionaire artists, while making the world poorer for the rest of us.

I’ve already put one of my scripts into the public domain; I suspect I’ll put more. For the moment, I’m offering a number of plays sans royalties, in the hopes that they will encourage productions. A lot of these plays encourage people to rewrite them, or create their own version. And I do not charge for people to download and share my scripts, or to produce derivative work based on my scripts. I don’t expect this will hurt me in any way, and hope that it will actually benefit me, by serving as a mechanism for audience building. Even if it doesn’t, I’m happy to do it.

I was once a very young boy, listening to the radio late at night and tape recording the songs I liked. I was, and am, a borrower of culture. Now that I make my own version, I should give other people the chance to borrow as well.