Monday, October 28, 2013
Copyright term extension debate provokes controversy, even for new writers and musicians
Congress will soon have to consider whether to
extend the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which President Clinton had
signed in 1998. The Act is explained in
Wikipedia here. The Act amplifies the Copyright Act of 1976
by extending copyright protection to authors from “Life plus 50 years” to “Life
plus 70”, supposedly to bring the United States into consonance with practice
in Europe. The law has also been called
the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”.
Timothy B. Lee has a detailed analysis of the controversy in the
Washington Post this morning (Monday, October 28, 2013) on his blog called “The
Switch”, here.
I’ll leave the details to his analysis, but it’s
clear that the incentive of the law is to “protect” big-time authors, their families,
and especially the bottom lines of media companies, whose stock price probably
benefits from the guarantee of revenue from cultural icons. (Isn’t it interesting how Wall Street is in
bed with the Democrats!) It protects the
idea of media and publishing as a numbers-driven game, which is quite in contradiction
to the values of new authors trying to get established. But copyright extension also tends to inhibit
competition. If may be interesting to compare this issue to the piracy debate
in 2011, where we saw that major media companies really do fear low-cost competition
from newbies.
Lee does point out that the extension act does
inhibit the republication of many older classics, some of which teachers
probably would present to their high school English and social studies
classes. However many important classics
that sell widely (like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”) appear to still be
under copyright.
The Open Rights Group, from Europe, argues below
that copyright extension does help big companies with their share prices but it
really doesn’t help artists, even established musicians and singers, that
much.
I noted, in yesterday’s post here, and in a review
of a couple of books on self-publishing in my Book Reviews blog (Oct. 16) that
businesses models in self-publishing vary a lot. But in recent years there seems to be more
concern among the companies that support self-publishing that authors should be
serious about sales numbers, and that accept that this is a “competitive” world
where results matters as much as vanity or message or even intellectual legacy.
I do have some fiction projects (a novel and
screenplay scripts) but I don’t have a problem with “originality”. The content
really is “new”. I’m not using any established characters or
franchises, so neither copyright nor trademark should matter on these
projects. If I get the novel out, I won’t
be hearing from Disney’s or WB’s lawyers.
You can bank in that.
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