So would creativity really dry up without copyright & artists not making money?

I have no problem with people making lots of money off of their intellectual property. But I wish copyright law could at least be amended to include a "use it or lose it" provision so that obscure, out of print stuff could be re-released by somebody who cares about it (e.g., Bear Family). A lot of great stuff is not commercially viable ENOUGH for the big labels who technically own the recordings, but it could be profitable for a smaller company or even as a labor of love.

 

Right, I think at issue was the early cartoons like "Steamboat Willie" which was 1928.

 

If Disney relied on "Public Domain" works for the early films then what is there to protect? Anyone can make a new Film based on a classic Fairy Tale or myth but what is protected is the means of expression. Disney's version or interpretation of the story.

Incidentally Steamboat Willie is virtually protected forever because Mickey Mouse is a Trademark and Trademarks have perpetual protection as long as they are used in Commerce.

I don't agree with your assessment of copyright extension as all a corporate shill but even if it is the end result protects artists riding on the coattails of big business.

While you seem certain that the term of copyright protection is never a factor in green lighting any project, it is certainly important otherwise no one would care if it were made longer or shortened. Don't forget any copyright holder can make their work available for free at anytime. I don't see a big line of artists putting out copyright free copies of their works.

In many countries artists are also given moral rights. That means they are entitled to money even on the secondary sales of their paintings, it also protects the works from being defaced or tampered with in essence the artist retains creative control. Much like a notion of "natural law" it is understood by those cultures that it is immoral to exploit the talents of a person without giving them compensation.

 

Now, here's the thing: If you don't want to pay for art, nobody is twisting your arm. But in no way should a party be allowed to wait for something to go into public domain for the purpose of earning income or gains from that work. Furthermore, the extention or reclaiming of a copyright is not a social issue, matter or contract. It's a mandate to provide protection for the creator of the intellectual property -- and clearly enough people believe that art is put on this Earth to satiate their whimsical pleasure to the degree that they declare it their own. The cost to create something far exceeds the price tag for the consumer to buy that work.

 

a strong argument could be made that the industrial revolution and the subsequent seismic spike in technological innovation is directly attributable to the advent of patent law. one could take that a step further and argue that intellectual property law in general feeds artistic creativity because incentive is needed for artists to bring their work to the market, especially now when so much of it can be had for free and without any compensation to the artist. for as lofty and romantic an ambition is art for art's sake, it doesn't pay the rent.

just something to think about

 

Worth noting, on this subject of extension of copyright term, and the contention that an environment of continual extension is tantamount to an unlimited term, not a limited one, the Supreme Court ruled on the law 7-2 finding that even if the extension was unwise or bad policy, it was in fact limited and a permissible use of congressional power under the copyright clause. Breyer's dissent framed this issue of whether or not the extension was serving a public or private good pretty well though:

The statute before us, the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extends the term of most existing copyrights to 95 years and that of many new copyrights to 70 years after the author's death. The economic effect of this 20-year extension --the longest blanket extension since the Nation's founding -- is to make the copyright term not limited, but virtually perpetual. Its primary legal effect is to grant the extended term not to authors, but to their heirs, estates, or corporate successors. And most importantly, its practical effect is not to promote, but to inhibit, the progress of "Science" by which word the Framers meant learning or knowledge......

This statute will cause serious expression-related harm. It will likely restrict traditional dissemination of copyrighted works. It will likely
inhibit new forms of dissemination through the use of new technology. It threatens to interfere with efforts to preserve our Nation's historical
and cultural heritage and efforts to use that heritage, say, to educate our Nation's children. It is easy to understand how the statute might benefit the private financial interests of corporations or heirs who own existing copyrights. But I cannot find any constitutionally legitimate, copyright-related way in which the statute will benefit the public. Indeed, in respect to existing works, the serious public harm and the virtually nonexistent public benefit could not be more clear.

Breyer may have overstated the potential danger of the copyright extension -- certainly the court majority thought he did and even I think I might agree on that score -- but I think his POV is worth keeping in mind when we think about why congress has the power to grant copyrights in the first place.

 

I don't get it... If it can't be available to the public for free, it will hurt future generations? Hmm... Not seeing it.

 

Actually it's very much a social issue. That's the point. Copyright law, in the U.S. at least, explicitly exists for a public, not a private purpose -- "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," science in this case meaning knowledge, useful arts meaning craftsmanship. It's all about advancing public knowledge of ideas and of ways of doing things. The mechanism for achieving this public, social good is giving creators certain legal protection for a limited time as an incentive for them to share their work. But the protection for the creator is a by-product of the intent of copyright: to promote public knowledge; it's not the reason for the copyright.

 

Well, that was with respect to certain documents and certain ways of accessing and studying them in the future, it wasn't with reference to pop songs, but I'm extracting from the dissent which can be read in full here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/01-618P.ZD1

 

Your's is the academic take on copyright law. Here is the government's perspective:
It is a principle of American law that an author of a work may reap the fruits of his or her intellectual creativity for a limited period of time. Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States for original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, architectural, cartographic, choreographic, pantomimic, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, and audiovisual creations. “Copyright” literally means the right to copy. The term has come to mean that body of exclusive rights granted by law to authors for protection of their work. The owner of copyright has the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and, in the case of certain works, publicly perform or display the work; to prepare derivative works; in the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission; or to license others to engage in the same acts under specific terms and conditions. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, procedure, process, slogan, principle, or discovery.

 

No, mine is the constitutional take, it's also Breyer's take, it was even the court majority's take therefore it IS the government's take. The description above is exactly how it works. But it doesn't get to the heart of why it exists, why we give authors those rights and protections.

That's what I'm talking about -- why do we give author's this exclusive window to use their work? We explicitly don't treat it like real property -- you own it forever, no one else can have it, and you can give it to your heirs who can give it to theirs and so on. Instead we have this other practice -- a limited grant of exclusive use. And if you have in mind the intent of the practice -- to promote knowledge, which is not academic language, it's the explicit language of the Constitution -- it leads to a way of thinking about copyright that can sometime be a little different then if you just think about copyrighted intellectual property as if it were real property.

 

Alrighty then. BTW, here is the actual government site where I get my info:
http://copyright.gov/circs/circ1a.html

 

Nor did Perrault and Grimms pay the people of Germany and France for retelling and copyrighting their commonly owned folktales so that they now "belonged" to the copyright holder, who proceeded to get rich and famous. All of these people co-opted chunks of the public common culture for individual commercial gain, as did a whole lot of others in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Alan Lomax and Bob Dylan.

 

Recently, a novel recasting GONE WITH WIND from the point of view of an African-American was delayed because Margaret Mitchell's rights holders challenged it in court. So seventy years after the fact, a serious author couldn't offer a new work based on an iconic cultural touchstone because the author's great-great-grandchildren (or whomever owned the rights) thought such a recasting might interfere with their own authorized sequels.

The first new English translations of Marcel Proust were issued incompletely in the USA because our absurdly long copyright rules allowed his holders to demand new royalties for the latter volumes. Some works by long dead modernists like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce are still protected by copyright, so our kids' textbooks either cost more or exclude these fee-generating works.

Moreover, how does paying more for works from long-dead authors and artists not harm the public? Should we retroactively extend copyright to Sophocles and Shakespeare and Beethoven, too, so every performance by a school assembly can also pay rights fees? To me, that makes as much sense as extending copyright to cover T.S. Eliot or Marcel Proust. Ain't none of 'em going to be inspired by our munificent extensions to create new works.

 

That's exactly right. That's how human knowledge and work advances especially in the area of culture and the arts, by building on ideas, and stories, and modes of expression that in the past often weren't traceable to one individual. That's why copyright law needs to be careful not to be so rigid and exclusive as to kind of freeze that process, which is a kind of a folk process. That's the challenge of creating laws and regs to govern the arts as a modern, commercial, industrial enterprise: how do we make the arts function in our modern industry economy and yet allow the creative arts to be the basic essential human process it's been since the birth of civilization. That's one of the problems people have with the extension of copyright creeping to something that feels like it's perpetual, even if it's technically not perpetual.

 

Creativity and the need to create has and will exist apart from money or any law. However, regardless of whatever technology exists, everyone has the right to be paid for what they create, whether it's an artistic creation, or the value created in a day's work in a factory or at the office. To assume otherwise means we should all be happy to give away for free what we create, including a day's work at our place of employment. Not sure about anyone else, but unless I volutarily provide value for "free" (say by working at a Habitat for Humanity build or my chosen place of worship), I fully expect to be paid for my contributions. To me, this would logically seem to follow the concepts that a capitalistic, free market enonomy are based on.

 

I don't think anyone's arguing against copyright. A lot of us are upset that it's been absurdly extended solely to benefit rights holders into seeming perpetuity, in complete violation of the social contract. Our legislators have put the "royal" (as in bloodline) back into "royalty." We're supposed to pay (and pay and pay) distant relatives and corporate shareholders over ever increasing years for something whose creation they had nothing to do with.

 

It's non-commercial fair use of copyrighted materials that matters most to me; even in educational settings, that seems to be encroached upon more and more, which is too bad because non-commercial fair use has real, significant benefits for many people without cutting into the author's livelihood one little bit. Do you know how many extremely useful written works by living authors/editors are out of print and totally ungettable through commercial channels? Yet I can't use more than X% of an out-of-print book in one of my classes. It has so little commercial value that publishers won't bother with it, but god forbid anyone be able to read it as part of a non-profit learning experience. Maybe electronic publishing will help some with that, except that Amazon et al. are trying to lock all THAT up in proprietary B.S. too.

 

Academic applications are Fair Use. The dissent is by definition the minority or losing opinion.

The Founding Fathers chose to provide copyright protections despite the fact that not much Intellectual Property was being produced in the Colonies. In fact the Colonies were guilty of quite a bit of piracy. Benjamin Franklin was a publisher/printer and was notoriously infringing on the copyrights of popular British books.

We behaved somewhat similar to the way China behaves today regarding IP protection.

Consider this the US was not the source of any Intellectual Property of interest internationally, until Mark Twain. Mark Twain's writing became an international phenomenon. Once we had an actual interest in protecting our own writers and Publishers we began to enforce the copyrights of other nations.

When China breaks out with their own version of Harry Potter or Star Wars they will crack down on copyright infringement.

 

Why rewrite Gone With The Wind when you can have endless settings and personality types to pick from for characters. Sounds like a cash grab to me.

 

Cash grab: that's why John Gardner wrote GRENDEL, Jean Rhys wrote WIDE SARGASSO SEA, T.H. White wrote ONCE & FUTURE KING and Sophocles wrote PHILOCTETES . . .

 

Right, that's the copyright office. It's part of the mechanism that's been established to administer copyrights. And it's where you have to register a copyright if you want to be able to sue someone for damages in case of copyright infringement.

 

Obviously. But it doesn't mean it's not an illuminating explanation of the intent of copyright law, which is why I'm citing it here. No one in the majority did or would have disputed his description of the intent. The case was most fundamentally decided on the basis of the idea that adding another 20 years to existing copyright terms was a long time, and even if it might have been bad policy (which the majority opinion written but Ruth Ginsburg hints that the court may view it as), but it still reflects a limited terms and as such was within congress' power to grant under the copyright clause and outside the court's power to strike down on a constitutional basis. It's also an articulate description of the problem many (and one suspects many in the court majority) had with the extension law.

In terms of fair use, there discussion of that as well in the context of this case and whether or not it was being abridged or limited by ex post facto extension, etc. The majority opinion is here: http://www.copyright.gov/docs/eldrdedo.pdf.

Obviously' Breyer's analysis of the constitutionality of the extension law didn't win the day, but his explanation of the intent of copyright law is spot on and his examination of the extension law in the context of the public purpose of copyright law is illuminating.

 

There is nothing wrong with that from a legal perspective. The copyright holder has a right derivative works based on their original works. Otherwise everyone would be making sequels to hit books and movies.

If they want to parody Gone With The Wind or do a serious analysis then it would be covered by Fair Use

 

Personally, I don't have a problem with the rights to a recording or film staying forever in the hands of a corporation or the creator. However, performance rights should end after 50 years. In other words, if someone wants to cover "Yesterday" I don't think they should have to pay Sir Paul anymore, but I don't think those public domain labels should exist.