Permanent Copyrights Are Goofy(tm)

By Carrington Vanston // 2004 Jul 14

I'm told copyright is an essential part of ensuring artists can benefit from their work. I'm in favor of that. But the well of public domain material is just as important to a flourishing artistic community. It seems evident that a fixed and limited term of copyright is the best for everyone.

The current limit of "70 years after the death of the artist" is already a ridiculously long period. But of course it just keeps getting longer each time Disney and others push the U.S. congress to extend it--which is every time material owned by those same corporations would go public. I would have thought the original setup of "28 years from creation" would have been more than enough time to reap protected benefits from one's work, but then again I'm just an artist not a corporation so what do I know?

Well I'll tell you what I know: infinite copyright is a bane to growth, to the economy, to competition, to creativity, and to a little something my great grandpappy used to call "common feckin' sense."

And while it's true that great grandpappy was hooked on 'shine and prone to shooting at gophers and the FedEx guy, I still think there's something to what he had to say.

One of the biggest problems with the current setup is that everything is automatically covered by these blanket copyright laws, and so all copyrights get extended whenever Disney whines about losing control of Walt's century old doodles.

We have lost over half a century of creative progress thanks to a handful of litigious copyright zealots.

The irony should not be lost on us that Disney, the great champion of permanent copyrights, produces more material from (and makes more money off) public domain sources than just about anyone. Without the wealth of public domain material Disney would not have been able to produce The Jungle Book, Alice In Wonderland, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, Aladdin, and many others.

Wait, did I call that irony? Sorry, I meant bloody hypocrisy. I get those mixed up sometimes.

Indefinite copyright means that the vast majority of material which would otherwise fall into the public domain--with complete support of the author--is instead mired in copyright confusion. Throughout history, all of our greatest works of art have been built upon the works that came before them. Allusion and derivation are essential items in all our best writing, music, painting, dance, and so forth. But we've dragged that process to a sudden stop because the majority of material out there now has unknown copyright status.

Did you think it was a coincidence that you keep seeing the same movie plots remade over and over?

We have lost over half a century of creative progress thanks to a handful of litigious copyright zealots, and the effect of this artistic stagnation will resonate for generations. This is the first time since the Spanish Inquisition that we've taken such a massive step backward creatively. Go team!

I looked into the wrong end of my Wayback Machine this morning and I saw that in 2133 I'll have a great, great, great grandchild studying this period in her history class. Do you know what she's going to write in her term paper? That we were a bunch of dimwits being led by slack-spined, poll-fearing politicians who are themselves owned by litigious corporations. (She's also shocked by both our zoos and our dentistry, by the way, and I was delighted if unsurprised to learn that she had never even heard of Avril Lavigne.)

But there is hope. We can let Disney and its ilk have their indefinite copyright and still move the great mass of abandoned material into the public domain. The solution is the Eric Eldred Act. In a nutshell (which is where all the best ideas are kept), this is a proposal that 50 years after a work was published the copyright owner would have to pay a "tiny tax" (say, $1). If the owner didn't pay this tax three years in a row, the work would become public domain.

At the very least, this act would ensure that material for whom nobody wants to lay claim would finally fall into the public domain, while to cost to the Greedketeers at the likes of Disney would be a measily $1 per year.

Come on, Walt, ask yourself: what would Mary Poppins do?

My MugshotCarrington Vanston is a humorist and atheist. Or vice versa. He wrote and directed the long forthcoming feature film Duck Duck Goose. He has written two tiny plays which had two tiny productions: The Sound Of Two Hands Typing and Stark Raving Happy. He speaks three languages fluently, but two of them are English with a silly accent. The third is English with a slightly less silly accent. He can pronounce his full name backwards, he has a favorite mathematical equation, and he wants that $2 you owe him. Carrington should be stored in a cool, dry place, and may explode if heated.

Current Projects: a film + a novel + to do before I die
Projects on Pause: a webcomic + a podcast
Destinations: my bookmarks