Culture, Creativity, and Copyright













This entry was posted in music, politics, random musings, society & culture, writing. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Culture, Creativity, and Copyright

  1. Tom Darter says:

    I think the problem, as you suggest, is the length of time that copyright holds. When we were in high school, it worked this way: You could registered a claim to copyright, and it would be good for 28 years; you could renew the copyright once, for another 28 years (for a total of 56 years), after which time the work entered the public domain. That has changed (retroactively in many cases) a number of times, and now we have a situation where copyright holds for 75 years (I think) after the death of the original copyright holder. That goes completely against the original idea of copyright, and – as you say – turns the work into a commodity that generates income for the estate of the author of the work….

    • midiguru says:

      Another way to handle it (not that our legal system is ever going to handle anything in a rational manner ever again…) would be with some version of a compulsory license. In music, once a piece has been recorded and the recording released, anybody else can do their own new recording of the piece, simply by paying a fee that is fixed by law. The composer (or copyright holder) can’t stop the new recording. If the piece is significantly transformed, the composer gains some leverage — and I’m not sure how this works in practice, because ALL jazz recordings of standard tunes transform the piece, sometimes very significantly.

      It’s not easy to see how compulsory licensing would work with respect to literary work or graphic images, but the precedent is there.

  2. Mark S says:

    Your Romeo and Juliet example seems pessimistic. An alternative scenario, had modern copyright laws existed, would be as follows.

    Arthur Brooke could have acquired the rights to translate the Italian original, in exchange for paying a percentage of his earnings as royalties to the original author who was, after all, the real original creator of the story.

    Shakespeare, in turn, could have acquired the rights to create and produce an adaptation of the story as a play. If he had used Brooke’s translation as the basis, he would need to agree royalty payments with both Brooke and the original Italian author. If he had wanted to go back to the source for his own translation and adaptation, he might have needed to deal only with the original author.

    Since the play was, in the end, the most successful adaptation, this arrangement brings benefits to all. Including, importantly, the true original author of the story. In your version, Shakespeare gets to take what he wants from the work of others, put it on as a play, and keep all the profits for himself. Now that’s hardly fair, is it? And the fact that 30 years had passed is not really an answer. Brooke and/or the original Italian author may still have been alive (unless they had already starved due to poor book sales). Quite probably their first-generation descendants would have been — whom Shakespeare had robbed of their inheritance! (Which is why copyright extends beyond the death of the author.)

    Modern copyright laws mean that J K Rowling is much better off than the poor Italian chump in your story! Which means that she can afford to feel benevolent towards writers of Harry Potter fan fiction.

    • midiguru says:

      But bear in mind, Mark — it would have been up to Brooke (and to the Italian author before him) whether to allow the later usage. You seem to be assuming that Shakespeare would, as a matter of course, been granted permission. That’s not a good assumption. Maybe he would have been granted permission, or maybe not.

      The absolute ownership of intellectual property, which is what copyright law is designed to insure, turns culture into a commodity. The notion of copyright has many benefits for individual authors (and thereby encourages them to engage in creative work), but it also has drawbacks in terms of the advancement of human culture, in that it may also prevent some authors from engaging in creative work. It’s a two-edged sword, that’s all I’m saying.

      With respect to Rowling, George R. R. Martin is also much better off than the Italian author — but he doesn’t feel benevolent toward fanfic authors, and there is no legal mechanism by which anyone can force him to be benevolent.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo



Connecting to %s