March 30 - Commons sense

Here's a thought. What if the Brother's Grimm had a copyright to their works? Where would Disney be then? It's not my thought, but one posed by Lawrence Lessig.

Anyway, our rights are not simply being trodden on in the civil liberty realm, they are also being drastically eroded in the intellectual property realm. There is this really neat correlation between copyright law and Mickey Mouse. It seems, every time Mickey Mouse is going to go out of copyright, Congress passes an extension to the duration of copyrights to keep that from happening.

There are two points, here. One is that, at present, no living person can expect to be able to freely make derivative works from any copyrighted material they enjoy today. The second is that this extension is made retroactive to copyrights already granted. The first part is a problem, the second smacks of downright theft.

See, in order for any copyrighted work to have merit, it must, in turn, be derivative. If, in fact someone made art that had no cultural reference whatsoever that we recognize, it would, in turn, likely have no acknowledged artistic merit and no commercial value. In order to have value, art must be recognizable. It must draw on the experience of the user. This is, in itself, derivative. In order to reward the industriousness of the artist, the work is protected from certain types of derivation and almost all types of re-distribution for a period. In the past, though, people could expect that, eventually, art would enter the public domain and repay the commons (thats us) for drawing on the familiar.

Not any longer.

It is terribly hypocritical that exactly the thing that Disney relied upon to make his companies fortune, plagiarizing past works, his company now unreasonably denies to the commons. Not just denies, takes away. People alive today lived with the expectation that they could make derivate works from Disney's material. These people have been stolen from.

In fact, they have stolen from us all. As stated above, all artistic works are derivative to a point. By extending copyright, the law is basically creating an environment in which art will largely stagnate because freely derivative works are not allowed. Today, intellectual property law largely protects large corporations, not inventors and artists. It does not encourage creation as originally intended, but now tends to stifle it.

It is time that intellectual property law was re-examined to again ensure that it is doing the greatest good for this great society. It is time to recognize the rights of the commons.