Intellectual Property Is Cultural Theft - Thoughts [View All]

Copyrights, patents and trademarks originated in early modern Europe as a means to protect authors, inventors and businesses and give them a chance to make a living from their works. Today these institutions have developed into monsters that threaten to altogether stifle the global culture.

Copyrights originally had a term of just fourteen years. Under the pressure of a mighty PR effort by the modern-day media conglomerates, in the 1990s the US Congress extended the term of corporate copyright to 95 years. When the rights to Mickey Mouse threaten to expire, you can be certain that Disney will lobby overwhelmingly to further extend that term.

All cultures, in case you didn't notice, live from myths and tropes. Although these basic forms can originate with individuals, truly new ones are very few and far between. When a new form meets with success, it can cross a line beyond which it becomes a universal part of a culture. Odysseus, Jehovah and the basic songs of classical and traditional music are examples. They belong to no one and to everyone. We are all free to sing these songs and to tell our stories of these legends in our own ways, even to believe the latter are real.

But this is also true of Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes and the forms of blues music, like what the Rolling Stones play. In our society, these particular myths and tropes are among those put into all of our heads from an age before we have any choice but to absorb them into our mental repertoire. But although the original creators of these three examples are long dead, under the law all three are still considered the private property of copyright holders who have the right to restrict and demand payment for their use. This is an outrageous fiction that the state nevertheless will move to enforce, at times with draconian measures.

In the news today we learn that someone still "owns" Sherlock Holmes, 80 years after the death of A. Conan Doyle in 1930. She threatened to prevent a sequel to the current Hollywood movie of the same name, if the producers should choose to continue (in her judgment) presenting the character with homoerotic undertones. This most definitely makes her a homophobe, but it also tells us that she - and the state agencies and courts who would enforce her will, were she to go ahead with her threat - are living a dangerous delusion.

Hearing this story prompted me to the above thoughts, which I decided to share with you as a prelude to recommending, in the strongest possible terms, that you watch the following feature documentary, or rather: manifesto.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto
http://www.hulu.com/watch/88782/rip-a-remix-manifesto

If it doesn't play for you, you can search for the video elsewhere or download it in varying high qualities from the source: www.ripremix.com. Not only do the filmmakers encourage you to copy and distribute their excellent and hilarious movie, they also expect you to remix it yourself and distribute the results! You can pay whatever you wish for the download, starting at zero dollars and zero cents.

Watch this, DUers, and tell me that our present-day copyright laws and institutions still make sense to you. (You'll also get to see how the originators of the blues said they heard the songs from the cotton fields, and how decades later the Rolling Stones sued successfully for damages from the Verve for using one of those very same cotton-field songs, so that they could sell it to Nike for a mint.)

I'll close with some thoughts given by Withywindle in another thread about the Sherlock controversy:



Source: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7396658&mesg_id=7401093