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just read another article extolling the value of universities licensing their intellectual property in a smart way.
I don't see why this is tolerated. I think universities are generally chartered to advance knowledge or to educate the public or something like that. This is a conflict of interest with claiming property rights over things that the university discovers.
In addition, I don't think the taxpayers should be forced to finance research and then give away the results. The federal government should only give research grants on the condition that any intellectual property discovered on the project becomes public domain (which would extend to practically every project, since almost everything seems to be funded by government grants).
Finally, the same logic applies to individual gifts. I don't see much point in giving my money away to universities knowing that the money is being used not to discover things that everyone can use, but good is the money doing for the public? Better to give it away to a real charit\y.
This is somewhat ameliorated by the expiration of patents after a ~15 years. No excuse for copyright, though (which lasts what, 90 years?). I'm constantly annoyed when I see what could be a useful computer program, made by a professor and her team, with a "copyright by ___ university. this program may be freely used for non-profit purposes only." (in effect dooming the program from useful application in business; theoretically I suppose the idea is that the university would commercialize the program and make money from for-profit uses, but in practise most such programs are left to rot). (by contrast, note that a crucial point of the popular open source programming licences is that they don't contain this restriction; GPL-licensed software may be used freely in both non-profit and for-profit ventures; so these licenses are much less restrictive than the default university license, which is sad).
I like the idea of universities friendly to the idea of their professors participating in startups, etc. I just don't think that stuff developed on "university time", with federal grant money, should be tied up and hoarded.
-- bayle
here is why DRM is bad:
...
Making sharing impossible is bad enough, but it gets worse. There are plans to use the same facility for email and documents--resulting in email that disappears in two weeks, or documents that can only be read on the computers in one company.
Imagine if you get an email from your boss telling you to do something that you think is risky; a month later, when it backfires, you can't use the email to show that the decision was not yours. "Getting it in writing" doesn't protect you when the order is written in disappearing ink.
Imagine if you get an email from your boss stating a policy that is illegal or morally outrageous, such as to shred your company's audit documents, or to allow a dangerous threat to your country to move forward unchecked. Today you can send this to a reporter and expose the activity. With DRM, the reporter won't be able to read the document; her computer will refuse to obey her. DRM becomes a paradise for corruption.
Word processors such as Microsoft Word could use DRM when they save your documents, to make sure no competing word processors can read them. Today we must figure out the secrets of Word format by laborious experiments in order to make free word processors read Word documents. If Word encrypts documents using DRM when saving them, the free software community won't have a chance of developing software to read them--and if we could, such programs might even be forbidden by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
....
Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call "trusted computing", large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. (Microsoft's version of this scheme is called "Palladium".)
....
Proprietary software means, fundamentally, that you don't control what it does; you can't study the source code, or change it. It's not surprising that clever businessmen find ways to use their control to put you at a disadvantage. Microsoft has done this several times: one version of Windows was designed to report to Microsoft all the software on your hard disk; a recent "security" upgrade in Windows Media Player required users to agree to new restrictions. But Microsoft is not alone: the KaZaa? music-sharing software is designed so that KaZaa?'s business partner can rent out the use of your computer to their clients. These malicious features are often secret, but even once you know about them it is hard to remove them, since you don't have the source code.
In the past, these were isolated incidents. "Trusted computing" would make it pervasive. "Treacherous computing" is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.
Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the US government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself.
You might think you can find out what nasty things a treacherous computing application does, study how painful they are, and decide whether to accept them. It would be short-sighted and foolish to accept, but the point is that the deal you think you are making won't stand still. Once you come depend on using the program, you are hooked and they know it; then they can change the deal. Some applications will automatically download upgrades that will do something different--and they won't give you a choice about whether to upgrade.
excerpted from
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html
(with the word DRM used in place of "treacherous computing" in some places)
copyright stuff
The Copyright Cage Bars can't have TVs bigger than 55 inches. Teddy bears can't include tape decks. Girl Scouts who sing "Puff, the Magic Dragon" owe royalties. Copyright law needs to change. By Jonathan Zittrain A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I WAS TALKING WITH A LAW SCHOOL COLLEAGUE about cyberlaw and the people who study it. "I've always wondered," he said, "why all the cyberprofs hate copyright."
I don't actually hate copyright, and yet I knew just what he meant. Almost all of us who study and write about the law of cyberspace agree that copyright law is a big mess. As far as I can tell, federal courts experts don't reject our system of federal courts, and criminal law experts split every which way on the overall virtue of the criminal justice system. So what's with our uniform discontent about copyright?
I think an answer can be gleaned from tax scholars. Without decrying the concept of taxation, every tax professor I've met regards the U.S. tax code with a kind of benign contempt, explaining it more often as a product of diverse interests shaped from the bottom up than as an elegant set of rules crafted by legal artisans to align with high-level principles.
Copyright is like that, too. While I hate its Platonic form no more than the typical tax maven hates Tax, I find myself struggling to maintain the benign part of my contempt for its ever-expanding 21st-century American incarnation. A gerrymandered tax code primarily costs the public money?measured by overall inefficiency or extra taxes unfairly levied on those without political capital. But copyright's cost is measured by the more important if inchoate currency of thoughts and ideas.
We live today under two copyright regimes: the law on the one hand and reality as experienced by the public on the other. The law?Title 17 of the federal code?proscribes such acts as the public performance of music without payment to the composer or the copying of books without permission of the author (or more likely the company to whom the author long ago assigned rights).
The limits on behavior enumerated in Title 17 have gone far beyond the wholesale copying of books, maps, and charts covered by the first copyright act of 1790. They extend to computer software, dances, boat hulls (delineated in a 1998 amendment as "the frame or body of a vessel including the deck of a vessel, exclusive of masts, sails, yards, and rigging"), and music?Congress covered performances in 1909 and copies of sound recordings in 1971. What the public can and can't do is described at a level of detail worthy of the most byzantine tax code.
For example, bars and restaurants that measure no more than 3,750 square feet (not including the parking lot, as long as the parking lot is used exclusively for parking purposes) can contain no more than four TVs (of no more than 55 inches diagonally) for their patrons to watch, as long as there is only one TV per room. The radio can be played through no more than six loudspeakers, with a limit of four per room, unless the restaurant in question is run by "a governmental body or a nonprofit agricultural or horticultural organization, in the course of an annual agricultural or horticultural fair or exhibition conducted by such body or organization." Then it's OK to use more speakers.
This astonishingly intricate copyright regime isn't created only by statutes, of course. The notion of "contributory" copyright infringement?aiding and abetting copycats?was devised by judges. In conjunction with a statutory limit on creating "derivative" works of a copyrighted original, a theory of contributory infringement led a couple of courts to outlaw the production by third parties of cassette programs designed to be inserted into the belly of Teddy Ruxpin talking stuffed animals. The idea was that by pushing "Play" when a non-Teddy Ruxpin story tape was inside the creature, children would be creating a derivative, contraband "audiovisual work comprising animated plush toy bear with unique voice." Since toddlers are largely unsusceptible to cease-and-desist letters, it fell to the cassette makers to stop abetting the kids' illegal behavior.
Still, Title 17 remains stubbornly vague, recalling Woody Allen's indictment of a bad restaurant: "The food at this place is really terrible . . . and such small portions." Including Allen's quotation here is probably fair use?but I'd have to risk a lawsuit to be sure. (He might have a similar worry, since he didn't come up with the joke in the first place.) No wonder most publishers proceed as if fair use doesn't exist, asking permission to use every quote or, failing that, doing without.
Title 17's copious detail used to trouble only professional (re)publishers and their lawyers. The title's reach has tended, as a practical matter, to leave individuals unaffected. The examples above might make for cocktail party curiosities, but whatever their indirect public effects?a craned neck as a result of trying to watch the sole television in a large barroom, or a child deprived of the full range of Teddy Ruxpin stories?they don't directly constrain individual behavior, which has been de facto governed by the second regime of reasonable practice.
The public has instinctively controlled its potentially copyright-infringing urges not through knowledge of the law but thanks to the combined weight of conscience and convenience. It's a hassle to photocopy a book cover to cover, so most of us don't bother to do it, and those who do are possibly such cheapskates that they wouldn't buy the original to begin with. (Kinko's?which lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a 1991 lawsuit brought by publishers over a dozen course packs that included copies of book chapters?won't copy a whole book on someone else's behalf.) Still others might actually think it wrong to make wholesale copies. They might choose to copy only a few pages or to buy the complete work.
As Title 17 has expanded, the corporate and individual regimes have diverged further and further, at odds but not in friction. The former is subject to increasing numbers of exceptions, counterexceptions, contractual agreements, and licenses among lawyers. The latter bumps along simplistically, limited by the amount of copying anyone could or would do as a practical matter.
When points of friction have threatened, the publishers have taken quick action, ferociously fighting against any perceived encroachment on copyright's rights and its associated cash flows. Recall the reaction of the Motion Picture Association of America to the prospect of a VCR. "The VCR is to the American film producer . . . as the Boston Strangler was to the woman alone," warned Jack Valenti, the president of the powerful group. In the now-famed Sony case of 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a 5-4 decision that the VCR was not an illegal instrument of contributory copyright infringement. Valenti to this day rues the loss despite the staggering revenues gleaned from video rentals ever since.
When digital audio tape recorders (DATs) threatened to enable individuals to make perfect copies of CDs, and copies of those copies, the music publishers prodded Congress into passing the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which required producers of DATs to incorporate the "Serial Copy Management System" in its products. The SCMS is defined nowhere in a statute that goes to the trouble of defining such words as "children" and "parking lots." But it prevents a DAT from making a copy of a copy if the copy is digitally labeled "do not copy me."
Taking a lesson from the loss in the VCR case, MPAA lobbyists won provisions for a tax on the producers of digital recorders and blank digital tapes. The tax revenues do not go to the government; they are remitted to publishers according to a scheme that demonstrates just how many parties wanted a slice of the pie. Title 17 now contains such gems as "2 5/8 percent of the royalty payments allocated to the Sound Recordings Fund shall be placed in an escrow account managed by an independent administrator jointly appointed by the interested copyright parties described in section 1001(7)(A) and the American Federation of Musicians (or any successor entity) to be distributed to nonfeatured musicians (whether or not members of the American Federation of Musicians or any successor entity) who have performed on sound recordings distributed in the United States." As a result of the law, DAT players were stillborn, so there were few spoils to split?no doubt a perfectly acceptable outcome to the publishers.
With the advent of the DVD player, manufacturers and publishers came together to create a nonprofit association that would control a "secret recipe" for decoding DVDs. Anyone who wanted to make a DVD player had to obtain the recipe. It was given only in exchange for a promise that the DVD player would have certain copy protections in place?such as conveying a signal that would jam a VCR trying to record a DVD?and that the player would incorporate "regional coding," which meant that DVDs from one continent wouldn't function in the players from another. This enabled DVDs to be released in different regions at different times and ensured that those licensed to sell DVDs in one region wouldn't have to worry about having their prices undercut by sellers exclusively licensed to sell in other regions.
THEN CAME FILE SWAPPING ON THE NET and the all-purpose computers attached to it. With the right software, individuals could copy digital content perfectly, quickly, and cheaply?and the presence of a ? symbol did little to deter them from doing so.
In theory, of course, Title 17 applies to everyone. Even the Sony case of 1984 included a token individual defendant, a VCR owner who was the alleged direct infringer. But no one demanded that he pay damages or change his behavior. More recently the Recording Industry Association of America has sought the identities of individuals who use Internet file-trading services and has brought (and settled) suits against college students alleged to be organizing file-swapping circles within their university intranets.
The recording industry is not going to sue the tens of thousands of Americans who engage in these practices. But it hopes to make an example of a few users to add teeth to the infringement warnings that file-swapping services send to their customers?and to pressure those services to pressure their customers to stop copying files.
The RIAA shut down Napster for providing services to Netizens to facilitate the sharing of copyrighted and public domain files alike without taking steps to filter out the former. (And Universal Music Group and a unit of the EMI group are now suing a venture capital firm for daring to finance Napster, under what seems to be a novel Russian-doll theory of contributory contributory copyright infringement.) The fact is that the Internet was built to copy things. Microsoft Windows's "Network Neighborhood" feature, for example, is simply a way to swap files. Almost every software application that capitalizes on this central functionality is therefore a Kinko's of sorts, and decreeing all search-and-copy software to be illegal is simply too sweeping a move for a court to make.
Publishers have successfully lobbied for widely reviled legislation to respond to this problem. The proposed legislation would require software and hardware makers to incorporate copy controls similar to those demanded of DAT manufacturers into PCs and other digital devices capable of displaying content.
But publishers are also taking the battle to other fronts, to Internet Service Providers, or ISPs. ISPs have little interest in becoming the Net police. They exist to move data around or to host it. A group with a decent amount of political power?whose members include Verizon, Comcast, AOL, MCI, and, of course, Microsoft?ISPs obtained a federal exemption in 1996 from nearly any liability under state common law for hosting defamatory or other harmful content. If someone posts a message on AOL calling another company's CEO a cheat and a fraud, depressing that company's stock price, AOL is under no obligation to take down the posting, even if the company has pointed out its manifest falsity.
ISPs have no such blanket exemption from liability for hosting or carrying unauthorized copyrighted material. No statute clearly sets out what is legally required of ISPs?and courts have interpreted the obligations of ISPs in different and conflicting ways. CEOs or university administrators providing Internet access to their employees or students don't know what their legal responsibilities are. When they receive letters insisting that they stop allegedly illegal activity on their networks, they gravitate towards a statutory "safe harbor" and take down challenged material?or deny network access to anyone accused of bad copyright behavior.
How is it that IT and ISP industries easily 10 times the size of their publishing counterparts are being harnessed to the needs of their little siblings? Because it's the status quo, some people see the current allocation of rights and duties under copyright as fair, and the happenstance of technical innovation that might displace it as unfair. A meatier argument is that copyright provides incentives for innovation, and if copyright is rendered ineffective, the creators create less or cease altogether.
What's obscured in that analysis is due credit for the longstanding status quo of individual practice in spite of (and previously alongside) Title 17. The Net forces us to confront the contradictions between what the law requires and what individuals do. Initial attempts to reconcile the two have been disappointing. Take, for example, the new phenomenon of music "webcasting," a digital transmission of audio that appears to the user like a traditional broadcast?except that it's available over a computer network. Under the 1909 copyright law and its progeny, a song's composers collect royalties for a "public performance" like the radio broadcast of a CD. No money is owed to the record company, since the CD isn't copied. Actually copying the CD is a right typically reserved to the recording artist (which means the producing record company) under the 1971 law and its progeny, and if permission is granted (usually in exchange for money), no money is owed to the composer of the song for the creation of the copy.
So, a question perfect for a copyright exam circa 1997: Who should collect when a song is webcast, since it acts like a broadcast (remember the 1909 law) but, technically speaking, a temporary copy is made of the song in the computer's memory (the 1971 law)? Should it be the composers or the record companies?
In 1998, Congress answered "Yes." A webcaster owes both. How much is owed to the record companies? Whatever they want to charge, if they want to allow the webcast at all. Unless, of course, a webcaster qualifies for a compulsory license by?and this is in the law?transmitting during any given three-hour period no more than any of (1) three different selections of sound recordings from any one CD, if no more than two such selections are transmitted consecutively, and (2) four different selections of sound recordings by the same featured recording artist or from any set or compilation of CDs distributed together, if no more than three such selections are transmitted consecutively. Got that? Oh, and the webcaster must take care not to preannounce what songs are about to be played. Hew to all these rules, and you still pay?it's just that the rate, rather than being set by the record company, is set under the law by a three-judge arbitration panel after taking weeks of testimony, as long as the panel is not overruled (as really happened) by a subsequent act of Congress setting entirely different rates.
The Internet links people together point to point, enabling individuals to broadcast as well as to consume audio streams. But they won't broadcast if they can't figure out how to do so lawfully, or if they can't afford to do so after being charged twice. Cheap software lets individuals prepare new works from the old, mixing and matching in the finest traditions of jazz improvisation. But people won't do it if they receive a notification of termination of their Internet service.
YES, I HATE THE EFFECTS OF COPYRIGHT ON A DIGITAL REVOLUTION that heralds so much more than the banal ripping off of CD tracks. I hate that creativity is metered and parceled to its last ounce of profit. I hate that our technology is hobbled beyond its paper and other analog counterparts so that it permits us to view but not print, listen but not share, read once but not lend, consume but not create. But I can hate this situation without believing that the idea of copyright is fundamentally flawed. The framers' vision of intellectual property (then known as "monopolies") called for built-in limits to a creator's exclusive rights. A copyright term, for example, would expire even if a work still held commercial value.
So why should we care who gets the merchandising deal from a movie or the song tie-in on a variety show? One reason is that the publishers' sights are set on the public. It is, for example, technically against the law for Girl Scouts to sing "This Land Is Your Land" and "Puff, the Magic Dragon" around a campfire without paying royalties. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers tried to collect such royalties. It backed off only after it faced public outrage?which was fanned by restaurateurs wanting to play the radio without having to pay fees. It now charges the Scouts $1 a year, foregoing real profits while making it clear that the girls sing only by ASCAP's belatedly good graces.
Attempts to reconcile the colliding regimes of statute and practicality, law and life, have been hamfisted at best. A formal report by a commission chartered by the British Patent and Trademark Office suggests, without a trace of self-consciousness, that we encourage schoolchildren to include the ? symbol on all their homework. The Business Software Alliance, a commercial software industry group, just unveiled playitcybersafe.com, a website for kids to inculcate the values of Title 17 over those of consumer praxis. There a kid can play Piracy Deepfreeze, becoming a crusading . . . ferret. "Stop the pirates from freezing the city! Throw your ball into the pirates and their stolen software before they hit the ground."
It's time for us to wise up and to redraw copyright's boundaries so that the law and reasonable public expectations fall into better alignment with one another. To be sure, this may require more, rather than less, subtlety. We should treat protections for computer software in a different way than music, for example, and lengthy copyright terms should be available only to those who bother to check in with the Copyright Office every few years. But we do ourselves a disservice by fixating on current income structures and not thinking about future possibilities premised on amazing technological advances, especially when the rights at issue concern the flows of ideas, something fundamental to free societies.
Scholars like William Fisher of Harvard Law School have floated ideas as sensible as they are radical?not to mention offensive to almost every interest in the copyright debates, from publisher to middleman to anarchist. He suggests in an upcoming book that ISPs remit to publishers a fee loosely based on the amount of copyrighted digital content that they are roughly calculated to be carrying, at which point people can trade music to their hearts' content.
Overhauling copyright will have costs to some. In the absence of tough copyright controls, investors may decide not to underwrite a $200 million blockbuster film because copying of the final product may unduly reduce their expected profit. But the cost of making no change at all must also be soberly assessed because the Internet offers such a staggering potential for the rapid transformation and evolution of ideas?a veritable Jazz Age of creation enabled by technology.
I pay my taxes. I have no idea how to calculate them, but I do what Turbotax tells me to. I'll pay a copyright tax, too, and willingly support artists whose work I appreciate, because it's the right thing to do and because it guarantees that more work will be made available to me. I'm not alone. So: Let's imagine a world in which Teddy Ruxpin can say whatever he wants, where kids can play with computers that are not digitally locked down, where bars and restaurants can stop measuring their TVs and their parking lots, and where amateur webcasters can create thousands of radio stations featuring songs we like, perhaps ones that sound familiar but that have new elements to them. We'll still buy concert tickets, books, and CDs and their digital descendants. They'll be competing with a lot more, though?created for fun, even if it happens to turn a profit.
"So the folks at monsterpatterns.com dumpster-dive to get envelopes containing discontinued sewing patterns and sell the envelopes via their website. The sewing pattern company McCall? invoked the DMCA to get the site shut down. Monsterpatterns is now suing to protect their 'fair use rights' to advertise and sell the discarded patterns. You might recall that this isn't the first time the sewing industry has cracked down on bootlegging grandmas and their suppliers."
"invoked the DMCA": http://news.com.com/2009-1088-984352.html?tag=fd_rndm#38
Monsterpatterns is now suing http://www.prweb.com/releases/2003/5/prweb67370.php
cracked down on bootlegging grandmas and their suppliers: http://archives.seul.org/freehaven/dev/Aug-2000/msg00003.html
--
http://www.chillingeffects.org/
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/publicdomainpostcard.php
seeing as how lots of great stuff is now being created for free in the form of free software, but the creation of free software is hindered by copyright, what is the merit of an economic incentive system for software creation?
Here's a cool quote:
---
... "Incentives" is merely a metaphor, and as a metaphor to describe human creative activity it's pretty crummy. I have said this before, but the better metaphor arose on the day Michael Faraday first noticed what happened when he wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet. Current flows in such a wire, but we don't ask what the incentive is for the electrons to leave home. ... Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone.
Copyright is resistance in the circuit of mind. If the resistance goes to zero, perhaps the circuit will become super-conducting.
from
---
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
-- Thomas Jefferson
David Levine and Michele Boldrin
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch1.pdf
The Case Against Intellectual Property
--- http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/EAFAQ.html
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/EAFAQ.html
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-bloom112202.asp
Right and Wrong The copy-right infringement.
By John Bloom
Whoever turned "copy right" into one word had to be a lawyer. We don't say "freespeechright" or "gunright" or "assemblyright" or "religionright."
As a result, 99 percent of the public thinks that a copyright is some kind of formal legal document. They think you have to go get it, or protect it, or defend it, or preserve it, or buy it, or hire a lawyer to make sure you have it.
On the contrary, it's simply a right, like all our other rights, and it goes like this: Whoever creates something that has never been created before has the exclusive right to copy it.
It's not the person who registers it with the Library of Congress. It's the person who does it first. Just the act of creation makes the right kick in.
Unlike other rights, though, this one is transferable. You can sell your copyright, license your copyright, or give your copyright away. What's most often done is that you let a big company ? say, a book publisher ? use the copyright for a specific period of time, in return for money, and at the end of that period the right reverts back to you.
One other difference: This is a right with a specific term.
The Founding Fathers wanted that term to be 14 years, with an additional 14 years if the author were still alive. After 28 years, they figured you'd had your chance to exploit your creation, and now it belonged to the nation at large. That way we would never end up with a system of hereditary privilege, similar to the printers guilds of Renaissance England, who tied up rights to dead authors and tightly controlled what could or could not be printed and who could or could not use literary material.
In America, land of free ideas as well as free people, this would never happen, they said.
Well, it's happened. It's happened because for years now Congress has allowed it to happen. We now have an exact replica of the medieval Stationers' Company, which controlled the English copyrights, only its names today are Disney, Bertelsmann, and AOL Time Warner. The big media companies, holding the copyrights of dead authors, have said, in effect, that Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were wrong and that we should go back to the aristocratic system of hereditary ownership, granting copyrights in perpetuity. To effect this result, they've liberally greased the palms of Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions ? and it's worked.
In the name of Mickey Mouse and other American icons, we have gradually lengthened that 14-year limit on copyrights. At one time it was as much as 99 years, then scaled back to 75 years, then ? in one of the most anti-American acts of the last century ? suspended entirely in 1998. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of that year says simply that there will be no copyright expirations for 20 years, meaning that everything published between 1923 and 1943 will not be released into the public domain. Presumably they'll take up the matter again in 2018 and decide whether any of these books, movies, or songs are ever set free. There are 400,000 of them.
What's especially hypocritical about this law is that many of the works produced in this period, such as The Wizard of Oz, are based on works from previous centuries that are already in the public domain. It's as though Congress is saying that it would be wrong for the heirs of the Brothers Grimm to own a perpetual copyright to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, because it belongs to all people, but Walt Disney's version of it is so sacrosanct it should earn money forever. Besides, if he really is cryogenically preserved, he'll need those royalties when he comes back to visit. (And this was a man who stole from everybody.)
I don't think it's hard to see who was greasing the skids to get a law passed that seems unconstitutional on its face. With 1923 as the cutoff date, all sound movies are protected for another 20 years. All pre-war Broadway musicals are protected. All swing-era music is protected. Even the song "God Bless America" falls into this period, so I hope you people are sending in your residuals.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule on a case challenging the Bono Act. It was brought by Eric Eldred of Derry, N.H., who started a website for his teenage daughters in which he published online versions of classic literary texts ? a site that eventually became a destination for students around the world and received a commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That all changed on Oct. 7, 1998, when the Bono Act was passed.
Congress apparently looked at the whole controversy as a property-rights issue. It's not. It's a free-speech issue.
The Constitution is quite clear on the matter. It says copyrights are to be granted for "limited times." I don't know any definition of "limited" that would mean 75 years plus a 20-year extension plus the chance of getting another extension later. The whole issue was argued three centuries ago, and it was established as a principle of democracy that, when the author is dead, his work becomes the property of all. This was modified slightly to allow the first generation after his death to continue to collect royalties, presumably to protect widows and children. But that's all that was intended. There was no argument ever made for a third- or fourth-generation royalty, much less a perpetual assignment of royalties to a corporation that never dies.
The reason it's important is this: Publishers are in the business of expanding capital. The writers who supply them are in the business of expanding civilization itself.
Tools for expanding capital are available in many forms. Tools for expanding civilization, on the other hand, are a limited commodity. They're resident in the books of Hemingway and Faulkner, the movies of Disney and Capra, and the songs of Kern and Berlin.
Give 'em up. We need 'em. We've got work to do.
It's not just the right thing to do. It's a right.
? John Bloom writes for United Press International. This is reprinted with permission.
