> at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit
That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about.
Today, creating/protecting profit is what it's been abused to accomplish though, often hurting the creation of new works, and most often not even for the benefit of the actual creators.
20 years was more than enough time for people to profit from their works when worldwide distribution was basically impossible, advertising was a joke compared to what we have today, and it was a massive investment to publish at all. Now you can publish for close to nothing and advertise and distribute worldwide in seconds. 20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me.
If we're reworking the system we also need to make sure that DRM doesn't prevent works from being useful after they've been returned to the public domain. That's a consideration they didn't have to worry about when copyright protections were being drafted, but it's increasingly going to lock us out of our own culture.
Not just that, you only get protection (in a specific country) if you make it reasonably simply available in said country.
I live in the balkans (but still.. part of EU, we have credit cards, internet, everything), and many many media (movies, music,...) are unavailable to buy here... not on netflix, no hulu here, not on any other streaming provider, not released on dvd, not available to buy any other way here...
...but somehow, if I download that movie/episode from a torrent site, i'm somehow causing them financial loss with my download...
Even in America, I've had to pirate TV shows from England because they simply weren't available here, won't air here, and aren't sold anywhere, even in England.
I can't watch Big Fat Quiz of Everything legally at all. My options are to break copyright to pirate it after it airs, not watch it at all, or to move to England. I choose the first. I'd gladly pay for it if given the option, but I have no moral qualms with illegally downloading something I can't even pay for in the first place.
This illustrates the sheer inefficiency of the market in this case.
While distribution is basically free (pirates do it at a very low cost), having a payment system set up for these "unusual" purchases costs more than the revenue is worth.
The best part is that the second hand market satisfies the legal criteria of ownership, but doesn't reward the creators in the slightest.
I've bought a number of media second hand to make sure I own them, and it's remarkable how there just is no way to pay any original producer for things in a lot of cases. I can download a movie easily, but there's no way for me to pay anyone for having done so - meanwhile if I buy a physical copy of that movie from someone else...the creator doesn't make any money from me at all, but it's all completely legal.
This is not entirely true: Selling on the second hand market reduces the cost for the original buyer, allowing them to buy more media than they would/could without the second hand market.
That's assuming second hand prices below the original price. Inflated prices for rare works (which could be easily republished as digital media by the creators) are a different story.
The big guys (Disney, big discography labels, ...) can afford to open a branch in every country. The small guys that made an independent film are screwed.
yes naturally of course you are. Its your responsibility to take a plane to a country where they do sell this, you buy it there, you buy all the region locked devices to play the media also in the region and bring it back home, where you consume the content. Only watch it yourself, if your friends want to watch they need to come on the trip too and buy the same stuff themselves.
How is that not obvious, that's clearly what the hollywood executives expect you to do, to comply.
Surely all use cases can't be the same amount. If I write a song and Disney uses it in a Marvel movie presumably, I should be paid more than if some local high school kid uses a 10 second sample of the song during their garage bands production.
What if a bunch of neo-nazis want to use my song in their propaganda video? Shouldn't I be able to stop them? Their use would be a detriment to not only the commercial value of my work but potentially to myself as well.
If copyright licenses on works could be had for cheap, everyone benefits. Sure, disney benefits a lot, since they can make use of the work more efficienty in large productions, but the result of _their_ work could also be had for cheap (such as someone else taking the disney movie and remixing it for low cost).
> Shouldn't I be able to stop them?
no you shouldn't, if said neo-nazi propaganda wasn't illegal to begin with.
Well if Disney made the same amount of money as the high school kid, and relied on your song to the same degree, then presumably they would pay the same.
As for what percentage of the derived-work revenue needs to be paid to you, let the deriver pick something that they think is fair (it just can't be $0). It'll be part of the metadata on that work so everybody can see how much of what they're paying is being passed along.
Then we create a culture of amplifying works that are fair to their dependencies. As for those that are doing the bare minimum, we name and shame (and sabotage?).
If it turns out that attributions coverage on 0.00000001% then we can talk about codifying the amounts, but I really think that if we just mandate the transparency, culture will handle the rest.
I was surprised to see WKRP in Cincinnati in the TV listings. It was my understanding that all the old music in those shows made them impossible to broadcast anymore, because (1) the copyright owners wanted too much money, and (2) for some of the music, it was impossible to find the owners.
Maybe they got past that, at least for some of the episodes.
Maybe they replaced the music? That's what they did in order to be able to release the series Daria on DVD. Included in the package was an apology letter explaining why they had to replace all the music.
They might have also secured some of the rights and just dropped the episodes containing songs where they couldn't. That's what Disney did when they put The Muppet Show on Disney+. A few episodes are missing because even with Disney's money they couldn't get the rights to all the songs.
OK, you made me look at that channel again. I thought WKRP was on at 5:30 (remember the days when you could only watch a show when it was "on"?) but it turns out it was 9:30 today.
I only heard a few seconds of Another One Bites the Dust and I'm not sure if it was the Queen version or not.
The closing music was custom, I think. So maybe they are just using the non-problematic episodes.
So fun to visit the backwaters of the TV world. They had a commercial for a product that helps you GAIN weight!
I don't have an online guide handy, but I do have a digital antenna (something I've written about before). (If you have line-of-sight with the tower, you can still watch major sports events for free. It's not dead.)
However, I think I saw WKRP in the "broadcast TV" popup on my TV. You can tell that they're going out on the web to get it, because at first it says "no information available" and then it populates the channels. It was on Channel 1 in the Bay Area, which shows almost all ancient shows.
You actually meant your local TV listings! I thought there was a TV listings section in the article, lol. I was confused as to how WKRP could've been in the public domain.
I’ve always thought the patent system should work the same way. If you don’t produce a product from or reasonably license the invention, you lose the right to hold the patent.
I'm a total GPL fanboy, but that would not only invalidate GPL, but make it legal to disassemble, modify, and redistribute all proprietary software less than 10 years old.
I don't think it's a great thing, or a horrible one; the positive and negative ramifications are difficult to even estimate. The software world that we live in would be vastly different in very many ways.
The GPL was a best effort, given the state of US copyright. There is no dissenting Open Source group who lobbies for the existing state of copyright because they consider the GPL as more important. Another version of the license can be written.
GPL found a way to utilize an evil law to do some good. What we need is to first scrap the evil law, then pass a FOSS protection act. (Besides, a 10 year copyrighted is so long that GPL would still be mostly enforced.)
Open source licenses exist to try and prevent attack on open-source by groups privatizing otherwise freely distributed code. It's an arms race. In a world where copyright's expire on reasonable timeframes, the value of copyleft licenses is vastly reduced since useful code becomes freely available within a reasonable timeframe.
I imagine they'd have to be reimplemented under the new legal framework. Attaching addresses to IP isn't so different from attaching predicates like "must be open".
It just shouldn't converge on takedowns is all I'm saying. No legal paths to censorship.
Information about the fact that more original work is prevented by copyright than protected by it? Only anecdotes about people I know who gave up on their dreams because they can't afford a lawyer to fight for their right to do art.
Information about the bullet points? That's my first draft of an alternative formulation.
> The point was to promote the creation of new creative works.
What are you referring to exactly, US copyright law or earlier laws from other countries? US Copyright law from the beginning (1790) was written in part to preserve the economic property rights of authors and publishers. Part of the point always has been protection of profit. [1] [2]. Initially it only applied to books, not to art. You can’t really separate the granting of a limited-time monopoly over a work from the promotion of new creative works, they go hand in hand, to say economic protection was never the point is not accurate.
‘In 1783 several authors' petitions persuaded the Continental Congress "that nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries."’ [2]
The earlier British Statue of Anne says similarly:
“Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted” [3]
Note that both quotes reference economic protection as the first reason, and promotion of creativity second.
> The origin of copyright law in most European countries lies in efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers
I think it's far more likely that they're about making sure that the wrong sort of bible, or the wrong sort of pamphlet, doesn't get printed. Whatever "for the economy" or "for the creators" verbiage is in there was added after the fact by marketing.
Actually, it’s almost exactly the other way around. The Gutenberg Bible may be famous as the first thing printed but publishing exploded in the second half of the fifteenth century across all genres.
The competition was intense and with no copyright law, it was a race to find and publish as many works as possible before they were picked up by competitors and copies flooded the market. In order to keep the presses profitable the printers published tons of material that went against Church doctrine. Anti-Church material was often the most profitable because the printers didn’t have to pay the authors for the content. The printers were driven by economics and the Church couldn’t reign them in.
The first copyright laws established regional monopolies so that printers could be controlled for the benefit of God and country but governments did it by freeing them from the laissez fare competition that dominated the early printing industry. By giving printers exclusive rights and banning foreign copies, governments created stable revenue streams for the printers so that they had the option of saying “no” to new authors. The Church exploited “for the economy” rhetoric from the beginning.
The Wiki article is something I wish I had time to edit. Yes, there was an attempt to ensure that the right sort of thing be printed, but it was also about making sure that no one else could print certain documents. You'd license a bible text to be able to regulate that it's the correct type of bible being printed, yes. You'd then see who else was printing bibles and shut them down. Okay, that's all correct, but there's more to its foundation than that. For example, in the UK, one individual had the sole right to profit off the last testaments of people to be hanged in Newgate Prison. In the 17th C, Parliament gave this power was to a preacher who in turn designated a specific printer. That power is what allowed the preacher (and the printer) to profit: no one could (legally) copy it. Regulating printers was the only way to ensure profit for an author and it was an attempt to guarantee conformity.
I don't think anyone has ever asserted copyright on the bible. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about? As for pamphlets, copyright can never prevent you from printing something that you created.
I'll have to brush up on my history of the protestant reformation, but I'm under the impression that for a very long time the church had a monopoly on people with enough dedication and support to sit around copying books by hand. There was no need for copyright law because it was totally legal to kick the rabble rousers out of the monastery for any old reason.
In this way, the church had been asserting copyright on the Bible for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the invention of the printing press that they needed a law for it.
It's easy to find legal text today that says it's for one thing but if you're in the know it's clear that its purpose--the side effect without which it wouldn't exist--is unstated or hidden. I'm skeptical that our picture of the 1700's is good enough to solve the same puzzle that far in retrospect, but my hypothesis is that if it was, we'd find things were a bit less about protecting authors economically than a surface-level read would lead us to believe.
There are some interesting vestiges of the origin of copyright, still floating around in contemporary legal systems.
In the UK, and in other countries patterned after the UK constitution, works of the government are technically under royal prerogative. It's usually called "Crown copyright" but it isn't regulated by normal copyright law. Traditionally, the monarch reserved the right to ensure that laws were duplicated exactly, etc. It's the inherent right of the monarch, and that right has never actually been explicitly curtailed by law. For example, Canada's Copyright Act has a clause, asserting the Act does not curtail any rights or privileges of the Crown.
It's probably the purest form of "intellectual property" that exists. Anything the Crown creates is under Crown copyright. The copyright term is forever. There is no fair use or fair dealing with Crown copyrighted works. [1] The justification for the copyright is not derived from statute but, within the legal conceit we're working with here anyway, rather literally from God and traditional since time immemorial.
Speaking of which, The King James Bible is still under Crown copyright in the United Kingdom. James I paid for it and his heirs insist on their due. The Crown issued letters patent to several printers, those letters were acquired and now Cambridge University Press has the right to print the KJV Bible in England. It's one of the very few letters patent to somehow slip through the 19th and 20th century overhauls; nearly all have been abolished by acts of legislation.
Letters patent are the granting of an office or title or right or property by the state to an individual. The granting of such rights was historically, also another royal prerogative. Scope-limited monopolies were very common. A monopoly on farming salt on a particular beach. A monopoly on collecting taxes in a particular county. A monopoly on dying wool a certain colour in a particular town. Such letters were considered a form of property by the courts, and they could in some cases be traded.
This is, as I understand it, largely the intellectual/legal origin of modern copyright in the Anglo-American tradition. It was, at first, not focused on the work, the text, so much as the economic right of a printer, to have a monopoly on a specific work, and to not have that right infringed with unseemly competition. As more and more letters patent regarding printing were issued, it eventually became formalized and then regulated by statute, taking it out of the Crown's arbitrary hands. At the same time (I think we're at about 1750 AD now?) the proliferation of printing started reducing the economic significance of the book itself vs. the contents of the book, and we started to think more about the author than the printer.
[1] Of course, practically speaking, in modern times, the Crown has issued various directives over the years, culminating in a whole department to manage Crown copyrighted works, and it's policy that verbatim duplication and etc. of laws are just fine. But very technically, that privilege could be rescinded at any time by royal decree, though of course that won't actually happen.
I was talking about US law, where the purpose was to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." but even that very first copyright law written saw the need for the "Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books"
The US law, and the British law it was modeled after, were both trying to solve an existing problem of theft. You’re right that the rationale did include the notion that granting protection would be good for society and encourage creation of new work (because the alternative they witnessed in practice was to make money copying someone else). You’re right that this was part of the purpose, but the stated purpose from the very beginning was in fact to protect authors’ and publishers’ rights to make money. Not only was that always the primary point, but it is also the very mechanism by which they promoted new work: the only incentive to create new work is that you have legal protection from copiers for some time so you can make money. This is why these two reasons are inseparable, right?
> The US law, and the British law it was modeled after, were both trying to solve an existing problem of theft.
No, it wasn’t. Creation of novel property rights is never to solve a problem of theft, because theft only exists in the context of existing property rights.
> but the stated purpose from the very beginning was in fact to protect authors’ and publishers’ rights to make money
The original British copyright law did not apply to authors at all, but to printers only. As D f goodzw
> theft only exists in the context of existing property rights
Of course the law didn’t exist before it was written, but copying others’ content was viewed as stealing, which is why there was a push to turn it into real, legal theft. Apologies for using shorthand. What words would you have chosen? Maybe you can make my point better than I can, because the law was in fact written in response to an actual problem people had of being able to recoup their investments.
I don’t agree that ‘theft’ requires existing legal property rights to exist, that is not the definition of the word, so your claim is inaccurate. Theft is the act of stealing, which is taking something without permission. It can be one-sided from the perspective of the person who was taken from, and still be theft.
> The point was to promote the creation of new creative works
for profit, profit of money and profit of learning. The first copyright law in the world, the Statute of Anne[1] specifically mentions money in the preamble:
> Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books;
(As an aside, I'm so glad English moved away from German or we'd still be using capital letters everywhere!)
Authors of the time were arguing against censorship, monopolies formed by powerful printers, and to make money they felt they were owed. As Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, is quoted as saying in that article:
> One Man Studies Seven Year, to bring a finish'd Peice into the World, and a Pyrate Printer, Reprints his Copy immediately, and Sells it for a quarter of the Price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament
Let's not misrepresent history to fit our own dispositions today.
> That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about.
Are there any studies showing that copyright actually does achieve its goal of promoting the creation of art? Can we show a causal link between copyright and art creation? Can we show a proportional effect where longer copyright terms lead to more/better art creation? I suppose it would be rather difficult. You'd have to find a control group that's otherwise just like the USA (or your comparable country) but without copyright.
Is copyright really the driving force, without which we wouldn't have creative output? I have my doubts. People were drawing on cave walls and parchments long before copyright. Would people simply not create art if copyright didn't exist? And if so, would we really miss that particular art?
As you point out, I'm not sure how you would do that study without having two otherwise identical countries that differ only by copywrite law.
Still, we can make some guesses what would happen without copyright.
eBook readers could offer all books for free to improve sales of their reader. Amazon already gives books that are in the public domain for free on Kindle. If Amazon doesn't expand this to all books, some competitor will. Project Gutenberg would also expand their collection to include all books.
Physical books wouldn't be free, but there would be no guarantee the author would get any money from them. There'd be zero incentive for printing houses to pay authors. They'd be allowed to sell the books without the author's permission and keep all the profits.
Authors' best option may be to ask for donations or start a Patreon. This works for some people, but in general, you make orders of magnitude less money off donations than actually selling something.
Would less money going to authors stop people from writing books? Probably somewhat. The most popular authors will still have ways to make money. And there'd still be people who write books for free, as a hobby. But it would reduce the number of professional authors.
I do agree that artists are going to create no matter what. I do suspect we'd have less works if nobody could make a living doing it though. Especially things like film and animation which historically required crazy amounts of money up front. People were willing to fund those efforts because they could expect a likely return on their investment which without copyright protections wouldn't be possible.
We've gone way overboard, but I do think some level of protection for creators is for the best even now when it's easier and less expensive than ever to create.
i don't agree. fine artists will, but the bulk of consumed art is commercial art, it's a job, and most people only work if they get money for it.
I like the soviet model of commissioning people to write e.g. math and science books: the author got a stipend like any office worker, and copyright belonged to the commissioner (the country).
> i don't agree. fine artists will, but the bulk of consumed art is commercial art
The bulk of art consumed is advertising. The bulk of art created however is not commercial art. It's people who paint, write music, write stories, etc. as a hobby. Even if it's just writing bad fan fic or shitty furry drawings people are constantly creating and publishing in their spare time. If all the commerial art went away, we'd seek out more of their stuff.
In the end there are very few artists who would never create anything again unless they were getting paid to do it. Money isn't really the reason artists create. They tend to feel a need to express themselves and have a love for the work they do. It's why artists are so easily exploited.
The works we prefer to consume tend to cost a lot more to produce and those are the things we'd risk losing if there
copyright didn't exist at all. It'd be a sad state of affairs if all we had to read was fan fic. Even then though, a lot of people create impressive and popular works and release them for free.
> That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works.
I wonder - if copyright expiration had been enshrined in something harder to extend like a US Constitution amendment, would we be better off? Or would the powerful media/entertainment forces try to convince the electorate that early expirations were problematic? Would we have a flourishing public domain or would HUAC have flipped on its head - looking instead for the enemies of the entertainment industry? Commies who don't want Mickey Mouse to make money.
- they force exclusive access to a technology for a while, promoting innovation and profit; but!
- they also force you to publish all the internals of how that technology works, promoting production of cheaper copies after the exclusive period has passed.
I'm not aware of copyright having any such function.
>20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me.
What about stuff that didn't land initially, but was discovered years/decades later and loved. Should they be denied the right to make a (belated) profit?
Seems like this could be handled by something like:
Either 10 years, or 10 years from when you collect your first dollar, so long as that first dollar is collected within the first 10 years - giving you potentially up to 20 years in total.
That's a ridiculous ad hoc argument. What if you make something, put it on a gumroad, and sell only one copy for 1 dollar (I actually started a shop on gumroad, all things for $1 and I got exactly one sale :D), but 10 years later you're discovered or some of the products is suddenly widely useful, or what if the one person that bought it now uses own reach to sell your product?
I'm not saying 10 years protection is not enough, but the "first dollar" approach I find ridiculous. Maybe there should be regulations where if you earn x% of the initial expenses (it would work at least for companies), then the work is released to public.
That was a means to an end, not the end itself. That's the point. The goal of copyright has always been very clear. It was for encouraging the creation of new works.
Done through the means of ensuring that the original artist may profit off of their own hard work and no one else can steal the hard work and profit off it. The abuse you're talking about is the extension of the same mechanism that allows rights owners to profit for much longer periods of time, which actually discourages the creation of new works. This can all be true because there aren't binary solutions and things need nuance.
Copyright is abused in may ways that go far beyond perpetually extended copyright protections. The DMCA has enabled copyright to be used as a weapon to silence criticism. Companies have created a revenue stream out of sending DMCA notices demanding that people (innocent or otherwise) pay settlements now or else face long and expensive court battles. Creators are threatened with lawsuits or dragged through the courts on highly questionable copyright grounds just to bankrupt them and prevent them from being a competitor.
Recently, the media industry has taken to suing ISPs for billions if they refuse to permanently stop offering service to customers who have been repeatedly accused of violating copyright. Without any court finding you guilty or any actual proof that a violation took place, if you are accused multiple times and your ISP doesn't disconnect your service forever they could be fined out of existence. Most of the ISPs sued so far have settled out of court, but the media industry has been winning in the courts as well.
Copyright is regularly abused to do things that go far beyond what it was intended to, and often to the determent of the creation of new works. Most of the people hurt by such abuses have no ability to fight it, and very little hope of actually winning even if they try.
Most of the copyrights nowadays are held by large conglomerates anyways and not artists, sure that's not a nuanced point of view but copyright isn't nuanced either
The nuance is with respect to the above conversation. I don't think anyone here is disagreeing that the system is being abused and that the copyright holders are abused by large conglomerates. I don't think anyone is arguing against the points you're bringing up.
Is it possible that the extremely long copyright time still succeeds in promoting the creation of new works? For example, under copyright, you can't take Mickey Mouse, throw sunglasses on him, then re-release all of the existing work, because it's not protected by the fair use clause. However, if you were to create something demonstrably different to the point where it does qualify for fair use, then suddenly you've created new media that you have the copyright for and can do whatever you wish (including sell it; whether or not it's used for commercial purposes is only a factor in fair use determinations, it doesn't instantly disqualify it for fair use).
The only thing the public domain seems to benefit is the ability to redistribute the work without iterating upon it in a way that makes it take on a new meaning.
> For example, under copyright, you can't take Mickey Mouse, throw sunglasses on him, then re-release all of the existing work, because it's not protected by the fair use clause. However, if you were to create something demonstrably different to the point where it does qualify for fair use, then suddenly you've created new media that you have the copyright for and can do whatever you wish (including sell it; whether or not it's used for commercial purposes is only a factor in fair use determinations, it doesn't instantly disqualify it for fair use).
Your understanding of fair use seems quite flawed.
Tell me, have you _ever_ seen Mickey Mouse used for _anything_ even remotely interesting that wasn't made by Disney?
One of the most well-known characters of all time, if fair use wasn't too restrictive, there'd be some derivative works out there, right?
The reason you don't is because what's allowed by fair use is _very_ limited and ambiguous (ie dependent on how much money you want to spend on a lawyer to defend yourself).
You can do reviews of shows/movies, you could probably do a really obvious parody, you could report on some Mickey Mouse news, and that's essentially it. Anything else will get you sued _hard_ and you will not win.
> Tell me, have you _ever_ seen Mickey Mouse used for _anything_ even remotely interesting that wasn't made by Disney?
No problem, just find and buy a copy of The Mickey Mouse Make-It Book [1]. It contains step-by-step instructions for making Mickey Mouse puppets and then encourages you to have fun with your creations. Straight from Walt Disney Production's mouth.
> The only thing the public domain seems to benefit is the ability to redistribute the work without iterating upon it in a way that makes it take on a new meaning.
No... fair use doesn't work like you think it does and it's a only a defense that has to be tested in court where you'll be up against the legal team of a billion dollar media industry that has connections and ties at the highest levels of the justice system
Once something is in the public domain you can use it to create new works that are completely transformative without risking losing everything in a lawsuit.
Vast amounts of new and truly innovative creative works are prevented from being created because of our existing copyright laws. Music is the worst at this where just a couple of notes being too similar to some other song can cause you lose everything. People have lost fortunes just for writing a new and unique song that just happened to be in the same genre as another song. (https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a...)
If those songs had been fully in the public domain, her amazing and transformative film (which I'd recommend to anyone) would have had no issues at all. How many artists aren't willing or able to go through what she did and just give up? How many musicians are writing songs that will never see the light of day because of fear that some song they've never heard before will be used to take everything from them? They can sign over all their rights to the RIAA and hope that's enough to protect them, or they risk being sued.
The public domain is critical for artists to be free to create entirely new works and build on old ones to create new works as well.
Most culture throughout human history has been iterative instead of anthologic. Often times the stories, myths, legends, and folk tales we have are because multiple people added to the story after the original author ended it to add a piece that relates to their own time or understanding. They didn't just say, throw sunglasses and a banana hammock on Beowulf and now he's Bae-o-wulf, original character, do no steal. The story of King Arthur for example has three different origins between the changeling child, the sword in the stone, and the commoner to king stories because for the longest time King Arthur's Court started in medias res. Then there's the fact that Sir Lancelot was a later addition to the mythology of King Arthur, appearing almost six hundred years after the popular stories first appeared in public circulation as a cultural response to the rise of the idea of courtly love. And the story of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight itself was a later addition as well to epitomize the growing ideal of chivalry. Even Alfred Lord Tennyson was adding to the story over twelve hundred years after it first appeared in response to gothic literature and it's focus on the beauty in decay and nihilism. To put it one way, Lancelot, Gawain, and Elaine were essentially fanfiction to the existing mythologies that became canon.
And the truest form of that iterative culture that still exists and continues building the mythologies or characters of these stories is fan fiction. People adding onto the characters and history of the fictional world, finding what works and discarding what doesn't, and slowly weaving together a full and rich story. This is in stark contrast to anthology style works such as traditional superhero comic books, where the creators work under direction and the rules of the world and the personas of it's characters are often not allowed to change. Unlike Guinevere who is eventually swayed from Arthur into courtly love with Lancelot, Lois Lane must always love Superman for example.
> For example, under copyright, you can't take Mickey Mouse, throw sunglasses on him, then re-release all of the existing work
You mean, exactly what Disney did? Create movies based on existing works (Brothers Grimm etc.) while ignoring copyright (Bambi) or against the direct wishes of the original author (can't remember which one right now)
That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about.
Today, creating/protecting profit is what it's been abused to accomplish though, often hurting the creation of new works, and most often not even for the benefit of the actual creators.
20 years was more than enough time for people to profit from their works when worldwide distribution was basically impossible, advertising was a joke compared to what we have today, and it was a massive investment to publish at all. Now you can publish for close to nothing and advertise and distribute worldwide in seconds. 20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me.
If we're reworking the system we also need to make sure that DRM doesn't prevent works from being useful after they've been returned to the public domain. That's a consideration they didn't have to worry about when copyright protections were being drafted, but it's increasingly going to lock us out of our own culture.