Wk1 Reading: Copyright Issues Part 3: The Creative Commons Solution

"Useless laws weaken the necessary laws."   -Montesquieu

First off, I want to disclaim that Lawrence Lessig is one of my heroes.  This man stood before the Supreme Court in a famous case ‘Eldred v. Ashcroft’ also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or pejoratively as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act and argued against extending the length of copyright any further which is effectively becoming perpetual copyright.

As of 1976, the length of copyright was the authors life + 50 years.  After that the copyright expired and the work entered the public domain for all to use for FREE. Walt Disney died in 1966 and as you know 1966+50=2006 so the Walt Disney Corporation was in danger of having all the old Disney characters fall into the public domain. This sent shockwaves through Disney and lobbyists to congress.

Walt Disney has been making good money off the public domain by repacking stories for years.  Snow White and the Seven dwarves is a repacking of a public domain story by the Grimm Brothers. Disney has been turning a profit on public domain stories (Hercules, Moses, Robin Hood, Aladdin, Pochahontas, Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) for years, but when it came time to contribute back their solution was to lobby congress to extend copyright effectively destroying the public domain.  In another 20 years when it comes time for Mickey Mouse to face entering the public domain they will lobby congress again to extend the copyright act.

As you can guess, Lessing lost the Supreme Court Case, but he didn’t take it sitting down.  He decided to found the Creative Commons.  This is a new area where authors can select various types of copyrights and grant rights for different uses.  These type of licenses have been working out really well in the software world, but the entertainment industry is not on board. 

Just to give you an idea of how twisted the thinking of the entertainment industry is in their thinking, imagine a device that cleans up movies on DVD so you can watch them with your kids and not have to cringe a F-bombs, graphic violence, and sex.  A device exists called ClearPlay. You stick a regular DVD into the ClearPlay DVD player and it will skip over the trash and mute foul language.  Even though the consumer bought the DVD, the copyright owners (movie studios) claim that the consumers are violating copyright law when they use Clearplay to skip and mute trash in the movie because this is an altered copy.

Big media has made it very clear that the customer is the enemy and they reserve all rights to do whatever they want and control how you consume their content.  Just put in a DVD or Blue-Ray disc and see how long it takes to get to the movie.  They lockout the controls to keep the consumer from skipping ahead and force them to watch ads and FBI warnings.

The Creative Commons is a nice start to fixing the copyright mess we are currently in, but it isn’t the final solution since it is essentially a contract.  The concept of the Creative Commons needs to have the full force of law so that it can be upheld in court.  The Creative Commons is no substitute for a healthy public domain.  It makes you wonder what Disney will do when they run out of material to repackage from the public domain.