Someone asked me to explain why I’m blacking out on January 18th.
I’d like to be upfront about this: it is not simply the SOPA bill that I oppose. It is the entire way in which the concept of intellectual property has evolved.
The US Constitution was one of the few national documents to enshrine the concept of copyright into its founding documents, and here is the part that counts: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
Why for a ‘limited time”?
Because very wise people, who were themselves creators of both scientific and cultural content, understood that we do not create in a vacuum. That, although it is practical and ethical to ensure that authors and inventors should have a monopoly to benefit from their works for a period of time, a vibrant culture needs soil to grow in. The public domain is the soil from which new cultural work grows.
Go take a browse through gutenberg.org or archive.org. All those ‘original’ pieces of cultural wealth are based on others. If Shakespeare or Emily Bronte were writing today, they’d be too busy fighting off lawsuits to produce anything. The truth is that none of us have utterly original thoughts. We feed off each other. Culture IS, in many ways, remix.
I support a very limited and once-renewable copyright law. 14 years with the option to renew for another 14. After 28 years, I’m very happy to see my work go into the public domain and become fertilizer for the next generation of creatives.
The truth is, the people who are lobbying hard for SOPA and other bills like it don’t give a shit about anything other than their profits. They have no respect of the creators of the works they act as middle-men for. They don’t care if what they want results in the production of new creative works grinding to a halt. They will be happy to keep selling you old Dan Brown books with new covers and reissues of Lady Gaga until the cows come home.
Why do I know this? Well, consider this: next time you buy a song off iTunes, consider that the credit card company you put the transaction through earns a higher percentage of that sale than the artist whose song you’re purchasing does. That’s the reality.
So. What can you do about it?
Please do not support legislation like SOPA. Please do not support legislation that extends copyright times to benefit the middlemen rather than the creatives who produced the work. When possible, please purchase creative works from the independent and small companies that release them and cut the middlemen out. And please respect the legitimate and legal copyright of creatives whenever it is possible for you to do so. Notice I qualify that? It’s because I don’t believe that publishers should be able to hang onto the copyright of books they have allowed to go out of print. If they can’t be fucked to make it available for money, then they don’t deserve to sit on that work in virtual perpetuity. The rights should revert back to the author, or where the author is dead, they should go into the public domain.
For more on these issues, read Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright (available free as a PDF download), Julie E. Cohen’s The Place of the User in Copyright Law , a wonderful TED talk by Lawrence Lessig: Laws that Choke Creativity , James Boyle: The Public Domain – Enclosing the Commons of the Mind and finally, and brilliantly, a look at how the mythology of how copyright might not be as economically beneficial to authors as is commonly assumed: Michelle Boldrin’s ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’.
All of these texts are downloadable free or readable online.
Well said RG. The real kicker is that Walt Disney ripped off Mickey Mouse in the first place.
Great piece. I’m amazed more artists and creatives haven’t voiced their opposition to this, based on what they have to lose over it.
I don’t know much at all about this subject, but 14 years is very short. I’ve been writing my own fiction story for 14 years, and I’m almost 50, so, 1997 to me is VERY recent.
So are you saying that someone should be able to take a 1997 Stephen King novel and put their own name on it and sell it as their own? Or are you saying that a 1997 Stephen King novel should become public domain and be sold by anyone and everyone, or that it should become distributable by anyone and everyone but must be given away for free? If so, on all of those accounts, I disagree strongly.
But I do find it frustrating when something is not available, is out of print, has never been put on DVD, for example, and yet it keeps getting taken down from YouTube. If it is not buyable, it seems reasonable that if someone puts it online, it should be allowed to remain there, even if technically it’s violating copyright.
You know, it does piss me off when I write something quite clearly, and someone doesn’t read it. NO THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID. Please READ my post before going off on it! I said 14 years with an option to renew for another 14, which means 28. This was, up until 1988, the standard span of a copyright. And the world didn’t fall apart. People seemed to be very happy to create. To your second question. Copyright does not affect authorship. Shakespeare’s plays will always be attributed to Shakespeare.
I feel there is a need to embrace the fact that art feeds art. I am constantly aware of how authors (and myself) are influenced by each other, and how rich and fruitful an experience it is when you read/see/hear something and you can feel where it came from. Of course there are ways to do this without breaching current copyright laws, but still… the whole thing is becoming ridiculous.
I’ll admit that I didn’t understand the complete ins and outs of SOPA when I blacked out on 18th, but I knew enough to understand that it was important. But your article makes things clearer, which is always good.
Also, although this is a different issue, as a director/actor I find the rights laws for performances of plays – the life span of the author plus 75 years – to be extremely irritating. Surely writers want their work performed?