| |
 |
|
|
Movies Forum Index » Silent Movies Forum » Washington Post: Copyrights and Wrongs: Damming the Flow of
Page 1 of 1
|
| Author |
Message |
| Bruce Calver |
 Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:09 pm |
|
|
|
Guest
|
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16437-2004Mar22.html
Daily Book Review
Copyrights and Wrongs: Damming the Flow of 'Free' Information
By Chris Lehmann,
deputy editor of Book World, whose e-mail address is lehmannc@washpost.com
Tuesday, March 23, 2004; Page C02
FREE CULTURE
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control
Creativity
By Lawrence Lessig
Penguin Press. 345 pp. $24.95
If, as the old New Economy shibboleth goes, information wants to be free, why is
it everywhere in chains? Why does the Recording Industry Association of America
bring enormous punitive lawsuits against high school kids who have used their
browsers to download MP3s? Why do online archives -- which promise to be the
most reliable forms of information storage yet devised -- grind to a halt in the
face of a copyrighted poem? And why does Congress now enjoy the effective power
to renew copyrights in perpetuity -- even though no less an authority than the
U.S. Constitution states flatly that such congressional grants can exist only
"for limited Times"?
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig stalks these and other mysteries of U.S.
copyright enforcement in "Free Culture," a more judicial-minded sequel to his
earlier book "The Future of Ideas." Lessig is one of the leading academic
critics of our copyright regime, and since he has advised or represented a good
number of the individuals and online enterprises that have run afoul of it, he
has a strong firsthand knowledge of the damage that over-vigilant copyrighting
can do.
"Free Culture" presents a sobering list of indictments. Even before the
recording industry went on its present prosecution binge, bigfoot proprietors of
intellectual property were targeting the reproduction-happy new technologies of
the Internet world for often absurd control initiatives. Adobe, the software
company that licenses many e-book titles, infamously instructed users of its
version of "Alice in Wonderland" -- a book that has long passed into the public
domain -- that the book was under no circumstances to be "read aloud" (doubtless
a clumsy misstatement of the licensing proviso that the software was not to be
used on audio computer programs). And even though Lessig champions the freest
possible use of copyrighted materials, the e-book version of his own "The Future
of Ideas" instructs users that the text is not to be copied, printed or read in
recorded form over the computer.
The drive to control every use of copyrighted intellectual property has indeed
gone through the looking glass. As Lessig notes, old notions of property
ownership have ceded ground to technological advances -- as was the case in 1945
when a North Carolina farming family named Causby alleged that airplanes flying
over their property infringed on what had been established, in common law, as a
property owner's right to claim dominion over his land in all dimensions, even
"to an indefinite extent, upwards." The Supreme Court wisely rejected this
argument, on the straightforward grounds that (as the majority opinion held)
"common sense revolts at the idea."
But when larger and more lucrative interests appear to be threatened, the law
can become a much blunter instrument. At just about the same time as the Causby
case, the Radio Corp. of America successfully used rulings that the company all
but custom-ordered from the FCC to prevent the inventor of FM radio, an RCA
contract worker named Edward Howard Armstrong, from introducing the FM spectrum
into the media marketplace for fear that it would damage the company's
commercial interests. Armstrong would never see his employer embrace his
invention. In 1954, bankrupt and demoralized by RCA's stonewalling, he took his
own life.
As Lessig observes, the steady drift of intellectual property law has continued
in the direction of the RCA precedent, as opposed to the more common-sensical
approach of the Supreme Court's Causby ruling. Lessig -- one of those rare legal
scholars with both a clear narrative voice and a fine eye for historical irony
-- notes that we hold intellectual property as oddly sacrosanct, even though
many of our present-day media empires have roots in what might charitably be
called a loose tradition of free borrowing. Hollywood famously became the
world's movie capital mainly because New York-based movie producers wished to
circumvent the strictures of Thomas Edison's corporate patent on filmmaking from
the safe distance of another coast. And Walt Disney, whose corporate mascot
Mickey Mouse has been granted a recent exemption from the expiration of his own
copyright, introduced the chipper four-fingered rodent in an animated short that
parodied a Buster Keaton comedy, "Steamboat Bill, Jr."
The lesson here is not that Disney or Hollywood is by definition criminal, but
that culture always has and likely always will be a dizzily appropriative
enterprise, building on the knowledge, the experimental idioms, the ideas and
language of countless contemporary creators and influential forerunners.
Nevertheless, as the Internet enables cultural productions to circulate much
more widely and freely than ever before, the world's biggest media players and
their commercial lobbies are using the law to freeze the production of culture
in their own historical moment, and to their own considerable advantage. And
Congress, well lubricated with lobbying dollars from media conglomerates, has
briskly obliged. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act seeks to secure
online copyright protections but has been used to intimidate even law scholars
into refraining from even discussing weaknesses in proprietary codes. And the
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (yes, you read that correctly) allows
Congress to extend copyright well beyond a creative work's originally stipulated
term -- and indeed well beyond what copyright attorneys call the commercial life
of a creative work. Indeed, the U.S. Congress now enjoys the theoretical
prerogative to extend copyrights in perpetuity. This amounts, as Lessig argues,
to a state of war on any coherent notion of the public domain: "Never in our
history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our
culture than now. . . . Never has copyright protected such a wide range of
rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term that was remotely as
long."
The first two-thirds of "Free Culture" make this case quite patiently and
effectively -- despite Lessig's occasional weakness for dramatic italics.
Unfortunately, Lessig devotes much of the remainder of the book to a
blow-by-blow account of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the test case he argued against the
Bono act before the Supreme Court. Lessig lost the case, and he takes far too
much time here pointing up his own flawed arguments and strategic miscues, while
trying to map out an alternative winning strategy. Then again, it's hard to
begrudge him a bit of obsessiveness in the wake of the Eldred setback: As the
rest of "Free Culture" makes clear, the arcane ins and outs of today's copyright
battles now mask a much deeper cultural struggle in which the stakes have grown
unthinkably high.
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archive
http://home.comcast.net/~silentfilm/home.htm
Remove the "xspam" to reply |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| |
|
Page 1 of 1
All times are GMT - 5 Hours
The time now is Fri Sep 05, 2008 7:12 am
|
|