An op-ed at the Washington Post by Ted Genoways touches on a subject I’ve addressed in the past, how our present copyright law suppresses works and creativity to the benefit of a few wealthy corporations:
Under the original Copyright Act of 1790, a work could be protected for 14 years, renewable for another 14-year term if the work’s author was still alive. In time, the maximum copyright grew from 28 years to 56 years and then to 75 years. In 1998, Sonny Bono championed an extension that would protect works created after 1978 for 70 years after the death of the author and the copyright of works created after 1922 to as long as 120 years.
This worked out great for Disney — which, not coincidentally, was founded in 1923 — but less so for the reputations of authors who produced important work between the 1920s and 1950s. Because copyright law became such a tangle, many of these works have truly languished. Here, Hurston is the rule rather than the exception. I have a file that I’ve kept over the years of significant unpublished works by well-known writers from the era: William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson and Weldon Kees, among others. The works aren’t really “lost,†of course, but they are tied up in a legal limbo. Because of the literary reputations of those writers, their unpublished works will eventually see the light of day — whenever their heirs decide that the royalties are spreading a little too thin and there’s money to be made from new works. But other important writers who are little-known or unknown will remain so because they don’t have easily identifiable heirs — or, worse, because self-interested, or even uninterested executors, control their estates.
We should return to the Copyright Act of 1790 or, given the extremely short attention spans that prevail today, reduce the 14 years to 10.
The purpose of the copyright is to reward creators not to ensure the holdings of Disney stockholders. A return to the original purpose of the copyright is long overdue.
The argument somewhat misses a key change in the last 20 years.
A paradigm shift in thinking on copyright / intellectual property in certain industries. Open source is king in many parts software industry; even companies that once termed it a cancer now embrace open source. Wikipedia has upended encyclopedias. A hot trend in hardware is RISC-V, an open source instruction competing against proprietary x86 and ARM.
Maybe the question (and the opportunity) is what other intellectual property paradigm’s could work in the entertainment industry?
For every company that embraces open source software I know of three that ban it. It may be a small company/startup vs. large/established issue.
Additionally, most government offices in the U. S. of which I’m aware have governance rules preventing bringing desktops/notebooks with open source software into the building.
IMO the real challenge for copyright is that it’s enforceable only in the U. S., Canada, and Europe which puts creators and consumers in those places at a disadvantage from a world standpoint.