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The Double Edge of Copyright Extensions
porkface writes "The Morning News is running a simple, but eloquent editorial that plainly shows how Hollywood has routinely benefitted from the expiration of copyright, despite their adamant pressure on Capitol Hill to extend copyright almost indefinitely."
Corporations are run by people, beings with a great sense of need for continuity; it is this fact alone that keeps me from being surprised by the way in which some companies - from copyright-protecting movie companies which could make good out of expired copyrights to napster-fearing record labels which could use the heightened interest in their music that online exposure would bring to open-source-scared software giants who could use a little outsider criticism of their code - choose the status quo over slightly modifying the business plan to accommodate for a new world and possibly even larger profits...
What's mine is mine, what's yours should be mine also if I can profit from it.
You mean that they've been profiting... and still trying to pay off congress to let them profit more?!? Next you'll be telling me the record companies are going bankrupt.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
"Do as we say, not as we do," apparently.
(this post brought to you by the ASDRWDRTA... the Association for SlashDot Readers Who Don't Read The Article)
For me, the one argument I don't think big media understands here, is that Disney could still use Mickey Mouse heavily when the copyright on "him" expires. There's nothing about the expiration of copyright that says they have to remove him from Disneyland and stop selling his likeness.
It's not like they do anything these days that requires them to have some kind of exclusive rights. Even if Mickey becomes ubiquitous elsewhere, Disney can always remind us he's their child.
The public is served when copyright expires in a reasonable amount of time, because new derivitive works can flourish, and the former owner has to get of their ass and contribute something new if they want to make money.
This whole issue is yet another example of big media screwing the American public. Viva La Napster!
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There's really only a few big media companies now. The can sublicense out to themselves all they need to (ex. How many old 80's shows/cartoons have popped up as movies lately). I hate to sound cynical (well, no I don't actually) but Hollywood isn't about creativity, it's about money. Owning the merchandising rights to Mikey Mouse is worth way more than free rights to some old book. Come on folks, let's be realistic.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hollywood has routinely benefitted from the expiration of copyright, despite their adamant pressure on Capitol Hill to extend copyright almost indefinitely.
That's because they benefitted from the copyright expiration of works that they didn't make. Now that they've made a ton of money built from the ideas of others, they want to protect themselves. This is not shocking, it's how companies work. It reminds me of how most companies feel about open source code. Sure, open source is great, when you're not the one writing it.
LXG is based on a comic book entitled The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
I say this acronym doesn't have a LEG to stand on.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
We must inform you that one of our member companies owns the copyright to that joke, and will for the next 287 years, congress willing.
This is a formal request to cease and desist telling it, you evil, evil, AC.
Aggressively yours,
The Lame Joke Association of America
...to the link at the bottom of the editorial - http://eldred.cc - where a campaign to petition Congress to effectively add registration to patents over fifty years old is underway.
Granted, if they want to mess with anything below fifty years, they are on seriously shaky ground - a $1.00 tax isn't enough to be considered more than a formality, in my opinion. Still, just imagine how much stuff Disney will find itself dealing with on a yearly basis to keep all of its creations and movies locked from the public domain - even if they're a large enough corporation to deal with it.
Nicholas Eckert
vidstudent
If the MPAA backed extending the statuted of limitations, would the supreme court allow child molesters off the hook?
Fight Spammers!
Everyone is griping about how long copyright is, instead lets lobby congress to reduce the length back towards the origional 28 years.
What congress can do, it can undo. All that is needed is a little pressure. In fact there is a large lobby group that already exists in trying to reduce the copyright period to 50 years, unless the owners pays $1 at:
http://eldred.cc/
So lend your support to it.
I recall reading recently about a spat between Nintendo and Universal(?). Basically Universal called up Nintendo one day saying to cough up millions of bucks for Donkey Kong, because, so they claimed that they (universal) owned the rights to King Kong. Well as the story went, Nintendo wanted to quickly settle as to not rock to boat of their franchise. So they went away tell universal they were going to research the amount and get back to them. Well Nintento cameback and told universal to go wash their heads. It seems that back in the day Universal went thru great pains to prove that King Kong was public domain so *they* didnt have to pay royalities. Of course Universal sued and lost badly as I recall reading. What can we extrapolate from this? Basically, if they cant get you to cough up legally, they will try to do it illegaly, by lying or misrepresentation. Its about who can scam the most bucks.. its not about 'intellectual property' at all.
(boy i hope that story was true:)
..that they still advertise a long distance telephone number on TV commercials for Disney World. 1-407-WDISNEY. As if it's not bad enough that a days' admission to Disney World for your family will set you back a week's pay, they won't even pick up the tab for you to call and order the tickets. This company with all its money can't be bothered to promote a 1-800 number like every other TV advertiser has been doing for 15 years.
And yet, people go for it. They pick up the phone and pay for a long distance call to contact a multibillion-dollar corporation with the intent of giving it money. I don't understand it, but I guess it's sort of like the rest of entertainment. Everyone hates the RIAA/MPAA and cries "boycott"... Until the new Eminem CD or the next Matrix comes out, and they fork over more money.
I will never, ever visit a Disney park and I make an effort to avoid Disney products. The copyright issue and the toll-free number issue are just two reasons. They're just a low down company, greedy and moneygrubbing to the end.
Foremost amongst them was Eric Eldred, a bookmonger from Massachusetts who wished to continue providing free texts to his Web site's visitors. He eventually brought suit against the federal government, and the Supreme Court heard his case, Eldred v. Ashcroft
Update: Mr. Eldred, according to his family, has not been heard of for some time. It has been rumored that Mr. Eldred may have had contacts with the "free internet texts", a free information dissident group, considered a dangerous hacker organization, and therefore very likely to be in connection with international terrorist groups.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It seems to me that liberals at every free-thinking college would be outraged. All their "classics" are essentially public domain. Why hasn't anyone else pieced together that lasting culture is defined by that which is freely available for use by all. Culture used to be about legends, shared experiences, and artistic works. Now culture is defined by some mega-corporation's marketing department.
Examples: famous paintings (images thereof, not the works), books (as mentioned in the article), nursery rhymes (Eensy-Weensee-Spider (C) 1982 by ....), folklore legend (Sleepy Hollow), and so on and so forth.
"Gee Mickie, why are you so depressed?"
Mickie Mouse: "They're committing Minnie to the insane asylum."
"But Mickie, I thought you said you were mad at Minnie and that she was crazy."
Mickie Mouse: "I didn't say she was crazy! I said she was fuckin' Goofy!"
So how long until I can expect a cease and disist letter from Disney?
There is a difference between Hollywood and a certain company. If the rights on Mickey Mouse expire I don't see what Disney gains in general with this. Since the company that makes the film doesn't have to pay anything to Disney for using it's toy, Disney won't benefit from it.
Of course, the sooner Mickey Mouse can be used, the sooner the second company could profit from it. But, they might think (or know) that keeping the rights for a lot more years will give them more money with the films they made, rather than what they'd get from using others productions.
You might also say that the use of a already worldly known character would make a film easier to sell to viewers, but since the film wouldn't be from Disney, who would be running to the theatres to see it just because of Mickey (it could even be a porn movie, not that you would like your kids to see that, would you?).
You can even add that Diskey could launch a parallel commercial campaign around the original Mickey. But, would Disney be interested in being associated to a XXX movie. Don't think so. So, in this case Disney itself wouldn't want to be in any way related to the film. Or in a case that the film is a serious piece of shit.
Of course who made the film, could generate more profit than the one it would generate from an unknown character. But the risk to the (former) copyright holder would be tremendous and possibly not worthy of the gain it would have.
So, there are, in my opinion, far more reasons to prefer an extension of copyright rather than a expiracy of it.
One thing I've been wondering is if many of the copyright holders are afraid of competition with the public domain. Some areas, such as literature, have this competition already because there are plenty of books in the public domain. However that's not exactly the case with pop music and movies.
From my experience, many of the CD's with classical music in public domain are often only 30% of the price of a popular music CD in public domain. That's not a big problem because classical music and popular music are two separate genres so the competition isn't all that significant.
What if the copyright was only 28 years and everything before 1975 would be in public domain? That would mean that we'd have lots of pop music and movies in public domain. Pre-1975 stuff isn't exactly the latest fashion but it can certainly compete with new music and movies. Pre-1975 would certainly be shown in television, heard on radio stations, sold on CD's etc. and that is something that makes me think that even if pre-1975 doesn't create all that much of money, preventing it from entering the public domain will help by making the competition easier.
Which is why you have to have a cutoff date on copyrights -- the origins of so much material is lost in the poorly documented past. What's new is that we've effectively fixed the cutoff date for all material late in the 19th century. So Hollywood gets to have it both ways: they can mine traditional literature for free material, but their own work (even their own interpretations of traditional literature!) are protected forever.
There are two particular instances that I find particularly bizarre. The first is the song "Happy Birthday" which is under copyright even though nobody knows who wrote the lyrics. (The music dates back to 1893.) So every time it's sung at a part... well, maybe that's "fair use". But it's a fact that you can't sing it on TV without paying royalties.
The other bizarre example is the Frank Capra classic, The Best Years of Our Lives. For various reasons, nobody bothered to renew the copyright on this one. That's why it got played to death every Christmas for so many years. Then all of sudden, Aaron Spelling informed everybody that you couldn't show the film without paying him royalties. How did he seize control of a film in the public domain? By buying the rights to the story it was based on, and also to a song played in the movie.
Perhaps if you really wanted to, you could challenge Spelling's right to collect royalties on Lives. But no one will: Spelling has deep pockets, and it'd be expensive to assert a moral principle here.
And the moral of the story, boys and girls, is that it's not about what's right and wrong. It's about who can afford justice!
I'm sorry, but I disagree. I suspect it is the way you phrased this rather than necessarily the concepts behind it.
Corporations and people that work in corporations don't act with continuity. There is no continuity of people, they certainly are more mobile in choosing employers than years ago. I would also dispute that there is continuity with people within corporations. Even those within a corporation rarely stay at the same job longer than 3 years. YMMV with different cultures, but given the above corporations *can't* act in a continuous fashion.
They act short term. Focus on Profits this year, sales this quarter, share price tomorrow. IMHO (yes, opinion this time), this is mutually exclusive with multi-year strategies.
Why do they worry about copyright expiration? Because the cash cows that make their profits this year, revenue this quarter and share price tomorrow are about to disappear.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Hollywood isn't a bunch of new struggling studios anymore. They're the old guard. They'd rather have permanant copyright, thus being able to remake their own old stuff or license the rights from each other, while still preventing new companies from using it. It's part greed and part laziness. Free public domain stuff is more a threat to them now than a benefit.
Only profits are protected, at the very expensive of fostering creativity that the Constitution is supposed to protect.
Now wasn't that simple? Why can't Congress and the Supreme Court understand this?
Just for grins and giggles, try explaining this to your local representative and see what they really say about it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yes, yes, the tales that Disney stole from the Bros. Grimm were in fact public domain folk tales from the first. Yes, they changed them, making them all pretty and full of cute anthropomorphic fluffy bunnies and dishwashing chipmonks.
None of this changes the fact that Disney selected these very tales because they were in the public domain and he could make free use of them as he willed and keep all the profits.
Perhaps the Brothers Grimm weren't the best example though. Are there any identifiable authors from whom Disney took works? Why yes, there are.
How about Rudyard Kipling? Heard of him? Victor Hugo, Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carrol, Prokofiev, R.L. Stevenson, Defoe, Washington Irving, J.M Barrie, Davey Crockett (Yes, Davey was an author), the list goes on, and on, and on.
Disney has made billions of dollars on the backs of identifiable authors whose works they simply took, for free.
The thing is none of these authors suffered by it (ok, some of them had been dead more than 50 years, but some of them hadn't) and Disney serves as a prime example of how *everyone* makes money by a reasonable copyright expiration period.
KFG
Not that it would make any difference. There's a similar principle that applies: Congress is only allowed to grant copyrights and patents for limited periods. One would think that extending the period every time it expires effectively negates this requirement. But in the Eldred v. Ashcroft decision (warning, big PDF file), the majority said otherwise. I suspect that they'll change their minds when Congress extends the expiration yet again, as I'm sure they will. But that's in the far future.
They do not have a trademark on Mickey Mouse, that's the point.
Yes they do. In fact, that's the only way they can protect themselves from "evil Mickey pr0n". The copyright on Steamboat Willy (and other Mickey works) does not prevent anyone from using those characters in all-new works. It only prevents people from copying/modifying those copyrighted materials.
And no, the trademark probably doesn't date back to 1928, but it doesn't have to. Trademarks don't have the strict requirements that copyrights and patents have.
Now, the situation if Steamboat Willy ever fell into the public domain would be rather interesting. People could make derivative works (including Pr0n) based on those images only, but would have to be careful not to push so far that the work would no longer be considered a derived work, because then it (probably, IANAL) be subject to trademark violation suits. An interesting reversal on the usual situation with copyright violations.
Disney and Microsoft have gotten rich using the same business model: rip off other people's intellectual property, and then jealously guard it as your own.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney