The surprisingly more difficult issue may be the reform of our copyright laws, which are sorely out of date and twisted from years of lobbying by big media companies.
Initially, copyright law was created to spur innovation and encourage creativity. If you created a work, the right to profit from that work was guaranteed for a limited time so an artist or author could pay the bills while working on his or her next project.
This right was never conceived to provide companies like Disney the ability to build their brands around copy-protected material, or to grant the descendants of songwriters the ability to make millions off their grandparents’ work.
Neither of these scenarios contain any real societal benefit, and yet the government protects them through a distortion of the intentions of copyright law, garnered through years of political contributions from companies and individuals who wish to retain the right to profit from this work, usually long after the creators have deceased.
The time has come for this madness to stop. It doesn’t make much sense to begin with, and it makes even less sense now in an era when sharing and recreating other work is the norm.
I can understand copyright terms lasting 10 or 20 years, maybe even through the life of the artist. But there is no public benefit to protecting someone’s right not to need a job because his or her grandfather wrote a popular song. He or she can inherit all the money that his or her grandfather made, but inheriting the exclusive right to profit off of creative work goes a step too far.
This is not dissimilar to the way that drug patents work. The company that creates a drug retains the exclusive right to produce it for a number of years, after which its patent expires and other companies are permitted to produce generic versions.
This allows the company to take the profits from having exclusivity on one drug and put them towards development and research of the next. They can continue selling the original as the name brand, but other companies can use the formula.
This makes it more profitable to develop new and better products than it is to focus on cornering the market on an old one. Setting aside the host of other problems with the pharmaceutical industry, it may just be the right kind of model for copy protection of creative media.
Requiring more material to eventually fall into the public domain would be a great thing for art, technology, and probably even business. There’s endless potential for remixing and reusing old work in new ways, and it could all be shared, traded, and remixed again on the Web.
Media companies would be forced to put all their efforts towards producing great new work, rather than spending vast resources protecting revenue from stuff they produced 30 years ago. Just as any filmmaker can make his or her version of Hamlet, any production company could make its own prequel to Star Wars. I think it’s safe to say that we’d get a better one that what we got.
These are complicated issues, and I certainly don’t have all the answers. But we must start seriously addressing the questions by taking into account the opinions of academics and economists, by looking at the potential benefits for society, and by no longer allowing companies that just want to protect their revenue on old products to dominate the conversation.
Most of all, we need to examine the implications of where technology is taking us, and realize that we’re headed there whether we like it or not.
– Tom Hoban
Tom Hoban works in cable television in New York City. Ask him why he thinks Aristotle would have loved Saved by the Bell.