Saturday, April 17, 2004

Mickey Mouse copyright laws The entertainment oligopoly, along with its political allies, is steadily reshaping copyright law to favor its financial interests. That's the view by writer Farhad Manjoo, writing on online Salon.com ("The mouse who would be king", 4/9/2004). The key instrument in question is the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, the act termed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, which prolonged Disney's copyright on the plucky rodent just as it was about to expire. The Sonny Bono Act extended individual author copyrights from the old extent, life of author plus fifty years, to a new duration, the life of the author plus seventy years. Even better for corporate creations, it extends their copyrights seventy-five years to ninety-five years. All of this is retroactive. Referring to a new book by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture), Manjoo writes. Entertainment firms and their defenders think of "intellectual property" as actual, physical property. Disney thinks of Mickey as a real asset, not different, in the legal sense, from a factory. But Mickey Mouse is not a factory - he is art. And giving intellectual property the same legal status a physical property is absolutely wrong. Manjoo cites other troubling issues where government is coming down hard on the side of protecting corporate ownership of intellectual property, for draconian anti-piracy laws to help from the Justice Department in prosecution copyright violators. In addition, the State and Commerce departments have been mobilized to "persuade" trading partners to similarly extend copyrights abroad. The rest of Manjoo article is more about stifling creativity and building in copy protection schemes that frustrate even innocent users, all diminishing the free exchange of ideas. The point for is that only the biggest oligopolies and their trade associations have the financial muscle to make such radical changes in basic rights. And since, the same media and entertainment companies also report the news, the reality of what is happening is rarely reported. Think of a creative person dealing with Time-Warner or Disney as being much like a cattle rancher dealing with Tyson and Cargill. Increasingly, creative work is done as "work for hire", with no rights accruing to the creator. That's always been a problem when starving artists have had to sign away their rights to put food on the table; it's truer than ever now, as corporation are systematically chasing valuable intellectual property that they can sell and resell. The key is that now, more than ever before, that creative work has no value until it gets mind space; and the portal to mind space in almost every case is through the big media companies. The beginning artist is in a desperate position; his future success depends on skill and timing as ever, but even more than ever on the marketing skills and budget of the media company: the ads in the New York Times, the interviews on Good Morning America, the press junkets, the bookings, the store displays. The music industry has always demanded a Faustian contract in this situation, and now other creative areas are following suit. That's why, for example, TV networks are eager to produce their own shows; they'd rather own a mediocre product than have some other company own an excellent, popular one. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly the "man bites dog" variety. Ownership of intellectual property may get even worse. As Manjoo points out, you can now at least take a book out of a public library without paying the publisher or make a videotape of a TV show for later watching or tape a CD so you can listen in the car. The ideal for the media oligopolies is a digital world where everything is copy protected and you pay every time you watch "Caddyshack", listen to "All You Need Is Love",  or use a new recipe in a cookbook. That technology is already in place in some quarters (pay-per-view TV, for example), and given the patronage of the government, big entertainment is definitely heading that way. 11:22:43 AM

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