Wired’s ‘Free & Unfree’ atlas: U.S. in latter category

Re:Zealots?
Countries that don’t recognize or enforce intellectual property rights at all have problems and create problems. However, in IP as in many other parts of life, the fact that some is good doesn’t necessarily mean that ever-increasing protection is better, or even neutral.

The Constitution authorizes the federal government to grant patents and copyrights for “limited periods of time” in order to encourage inventors, writers, and artists to publish. And patents were supposed to be narrow, protecting only the actual new invention.

Now, we have copyrights that are not fourteen years, or twenty-six, or fifty-two, but life plus 75 (or is it now life plus 95?), with some room for serious question as to whether anything will ever be allowed to fall out of copyright again, while Disney’s around to protect its Mickey Mouse copyright. How does preserving copyright, not only long past the death of the writer or artist, but past even the deaths of the children and well into the lifetimes of their great-grandchildren, encourage creativity? How would creativity hav benefitted if the works of Shakespeare, for instance, had eternal copyright protection? (And who would you pay the royalties to?)

Even though patents are protected for only twnety years from filing, the situation isn’t much better, because patents are _not_ being granted narrowly. Especially in software, internet, and business practice(!) patents, widely-used techniques, common practices, and blindingly obvious applications are being granted patents, enabling people who did nothing creative themselves to suppress or profit from the work of others, who were actually putting the technique/practice/development to work in ways that made people’s lives better in small but real ways.

I haven’t read the Wired article, so I don’t know what they’re saying, but there really is a lot to be said about the unproductive and anti-innovation ways that IP rights are being applied in the US of late.

Re:stale vs timeRe:Zealots?
Greg, they’ve _had_ a long period of copyright–a very long period of copyright. In the meantime, they’ve developed other stories and characters to which they would continue to have exclusive copyright for many years even if today Congress said, “Stop the insanity!” and repealed the most recent version of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Protection Act.

In the meantime, books, stories, plays, etc., that are not Mickey Mouse or the works of John Grisham, but which would have a readership, are out of print because they wouldn’t be profitable _enough_ to justify tracking down the heirs of something published seventy years ago, or the heirs are known and findable, but they are absolutely clueless about literary properties and think their ancestors’ work should bring in huge sums for them.

Life plus twenty-one years would provide for the author and their youngest possible dependent children until adulthood, and no company that was still producing creative works that people wanted to read/watch/listen to would go broke if corporate copyright ended at fifty years.

Re:stale vs timeRe:Zealots?
Disney already has the responsibility to enforce its own copyrights. We owe them reasonable means to do that; we don’t owe them, or any other corporation, a living.

Books or songs or movies usually have limited lifetimes. Some don’t, except on the scale of their entire culture; that’s what we generally mean by the term “classic.” Others are dead almost before they’re published. But in between, there’s a great number of books, songs, movies, etc., that drop below the level of potential sales that would justify making them the lead title for a major publisher’s main list, but still have a real audience that could be reached. And if someone gets those books out there, they might even have a rebirth of popularity and generate real profits for somebody, as well as real enjoyment for lots of people.

The ready availability of many editions, hardcover and paperback, full text and abridged, with and without explanatory notes, introductory material, illustrations (the original-edition ones or new), of most of our classics rests on the fact that copyright _ends_, it is not forever. Elevating the supposed “property rights” of the distant descendants of the creator of that work over the rights of the culture of the whole is not traditional, conservative property rights theory. It’s a bizarre new idea invented by people who apparently think that the concept of property rights is the only value that matters and the one perfect solution to _all_ problems, rather than simply one of the good, useful values that _helps_ build a civilized society.

Re:stale vs time Re:Zealots?
There’s already a category protection available to Disney or Crossgen or anyone else with a continuing series of recognizable characters; it’s called “trademark”. Viacom and its predecessors have successfully protected the Star Trek characters with trademark; George Lucas et al. have protected the Star Wars characters, etc.

The neat thing about trademark is that the company can maintain it effectively _forever_–as long as it’s around, and as long as it finds it worthwhile to do so. They could rely on their trademarks in these characters, and not affect the fates of borderline books, stories, songs, whatever, whose authors, and whose authors’ grandchildren, are no longer around to care. Instead, though, Disney (and others, but Disney’s the biggest and most aggressive) chooses to push for perpetual extension of copyright. What do they get with copyright that they don’t get with trademark? The right to be lazy and careless, the right to hold on to something they think is currently worthless, with no effort, in case someday it turns out to be valuable again. That’s because copyright _doesn’t_ have to be actively defended; no matter what you let someone do with your copyrighted property, you still have the right to stop someone else who does something you object to, or does it at a time that you object to. Trademark does have to be actively defended, so that if you stop defending a mark for a few years, and then decide you’re miffed because someone else is using something that might be mistaken for it, you’re out of luck.

This would be less offensive, if Disney itself respected other people’s marks and copyrights. They don’t. (cf. _The Lion King_ and _Simba, the Wbite Lion_.)

(And, on the other hand, I see no reason why they should be required to complete some long-range plan in order to keep getting protection, if they think it’s _worthwhile_ to trademark the characters and continue to use and defend the mark, even if it is just in the first few issues/stories/whatever, with the later ones never completed.)