Reason #2 to ignore copyright (part two)
If you haven't read part one yet, scroll down a bit. Or click here.

There is a fable that I remember hearing when I was growing up. A man is traveling through the desert with nothing but his tent and his camel. A storm comes up in the evening, so the man makes camp for the night. While he is safe in his tent, his trusty camel comes to the door and says "Master, it is bitter cold out here and the sand in the wind is stinging my poor nose. Please let me just stick my nose under the tent door." The man readily agrees. What a nice guy.

A little while later, the camel again beseeches his master, "Please, may I stick my whole head in? The wind howls in my ears, and my eyes are blinded by sand." The kind and generous master again agrees.

He wakes up a little later feeling a bit crowded. The camel had brought his whole front section into the tent. "Master," the camel says, "I only want to make sure my forelegs are strong enough to carry you through the desert tomorrow." Wow! What a thoughtful camel!

He wakes up one more time. This time he wakes up because he is very cold. He looks around and discovers that he is outside his tent. The camel has taken over.

In part one I talked about the purpose of copyright. We (the people), wanted to give creators an incentive to create. In return, they give us full and unlimited access to their work after a certain period of time.

That period was initially 14 to 28 years. Now think about this. How many of the thousands of movies or thousands of books or thousands of software programs or thousands of songs and albums are making money after 28 years? I couldn't find any statistics, but I am sure you can imagine that it is not many. That was 1976. So I guess according to Hollywood, our economy would fail and there would no longer be any incentive to create new movies if all of these movies were in the public domain. Somehow I doubt that.

The real reason that content owners do not want to have the Public Domain expanded is because it creates additional competition. If works before 1976 were in the public domain people would be able to choose between going to see Ocean's Twelve for $20 or going to their local PDT* and seeing The Godfather for $4. (*PDT = Public Domain Theater. I just made that up.) Should I buy the latest U2 CD for $10.99 or a collection of The 1000 Greatest Hits of the 50's on DVD for the same price? Because of the copyright monopoly, content owners can exclude this type of competing.

So how far back to you have to go before you get to Public Domain material? Well, to be safe, 1923. And that is for existing works. Anything published in 2005 will not be in the public domain until the year 2075. Or longer. And that's only if Congress doesn't extend copyrights again. Remember that term "limited times"? Congress doesn't. The current term of copyright is 95 years for "works for hire" (a company or corp owns the copyright) or lifetime of the author + 70 years.

So how did we go from 28 years to 95? Slowly. Bit by bit over the last 200 years and accelerating over the last 50. Authors and composers (but really just publishers) complained about the starving children of creators who were no longer making money off their father's creations. Then they complained about grand children until finally, in 1997 we heard from a prominent rock star about how worried he was that his great-grandchildren would have absolutely no income from the songs he composed. Oh, the humanity!

Piece by piece the public benefit has been eroded from copyright. The only benefit that now exists to us is the opportunity to spend money. And that's not really a benefit for us but for content owners. The balance and contract of copyright is gone. It was broken by content industries and our so-called representatives. We are no longer bound by it.

I never heard an ending to the camel fable when I was growing up. I know how it ends, though. Does the traveler meekly submit to being kicked out of his tent? No! He gets up, grabs a stick, and forcefully evicts the camel from his tent while the whole time the camel yells and whines about how he did it all for the masters own good.

Let's kick the camel out of the tent. Ignore copyright!

- posted by Dave @ 8:36 PM