IP: 'The Future of Ideas': Protecting the Old With Copyright Law

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
>
>
> January 6, 2002
>
> 'The Future of Ideas': Protecting the Old With Copyright Law
>
> By DANIEL ZALEWSKI
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/06/books/review/06ZALEWST.html?todaysheadlines>
>
> [T] hanks to digital technology, a delightful new art form emerged this 
> year: the fan edit. Devotees of the pop singer Bjork, for example, have 
> begun running her songs through their computers, tweaking the beats and 
> instrumentation, then posting hundreds of ''remixed'' versions on the Web. 
> Some of these edits are tone-deaf; others, however, trump the original 
> arrangements. And this summer, Mike J. Nichols, a ''Star Wars'' addict 
> living in Santa Clarita, Calif., used his Macintosh to make a series of 
> merciful cuts to ''The Phantom Menace'' -- most notably, the virtual 
> elimination of the irksome Jar Jar Binks. Fans who obtained a copy of 
> Nichols's ''Phantom Edit'' through the Internet hailed the arrival of a 
> vastly improved (if not yet good) movie.
>
> This nascent genre might not be around for long, however. Although the 
> Bjork remixes remain openly posted on a Web page, ''The Phantom Edit'' has 
> met a more predictable fate -- it's been squashed by lawyers. George 
> Lucas's production company, Lucasfilm Ltd., has threatened to sue the 
> pants off anyone who dares to set up a Web page permitting downloads or 
> trades videotaped versions on eBay. Why? ''We can't allow them to 
> duplicate and distribute our films for profit,'' a press officer has explained.
>
> This is the kind of wobbly argument that drives Lawrence Lessig, a 
> Stanford law professor, absolutely nuts. After all, can a zillion-dollar 
> company like Lucasfilm truly be worried that a puckish effort like ''The 
> Phantom Edit'' will torpedo its own DVD sales? And how can such a silly 
> fear justify the silencing of Nichols's artistic expression?
>
> Lessig's passionate new book, ''The Future of Ideas,'' argues that 
> America's concern with protecting intellectual property has become an 
> oppressive obsession. ''The distinctive feature of modern American 
> copyright law,'' he writes, ''is its almost limitless bloating.'' As 
> Lessig sees it, a system originally designed to provide incentives for 
> innovation has increasingly become a weapon for attacking cutting-edge 
> creativity.
>
> Sadly, Lessig's grim assessment is dead on. Earlier this year, for 
> example, lawyers for Margaret Mitchell's estate almost succeeded in 
> banning ''The Wind Done Gone,'' a slave-centered recasting of ''Gone With 
> the Wind,'' on the grounds that it was theft. (Indeed, the case is still 
> tied up in court.) And Baz Luhrmann, the director of ''Moulin Rouge,'' was 
> forced to revise his screenplay when Cat Stevens's lawyers refused to 
> allow him to use the song ''Father and Son.'' Why, Lessig asks, does 
> American law increasingly protect the interests of the old guard over 
> those of the vanguard? After all, new art always borrows from old. 
> Shakespeare's ''Hamlet'' was a remake; Picasso created collages from 
> torn-up newspapers; rappers rhyme over bass lines lifted from funk songs. 
> If that's the way culture works, why does the law so often stand in the way?
>
> Although Lessig is a proselytizer for what he calls an ''open access'' 
> culture, he is not some foggy-headed communist suggesting that artists 
> cough up their creations for free. ''Copyright is a critical part of the 
> process of creativity,'' he writes. ''A great deal of creativity would not 
> exist without the protections of the law.'' At the same time, Lessig 
> argues that those protections should be as limited as possible. Patents 
> and copyrights, he suggests, should have short, renewable 5-year terms 
> instead of the current system of 90- to 150-year terms. And paying a 
> licensing fee should be all it takes to secure unfettered access to 
> another artist's work. Over all, Lessig argues, the goal of law should be 
> to push cultural products quickly into a public-domain ''commons'' where 
> they can be enjoyed by all -- and, perhaps, transformed into something new.
>
> Lessig is aware that he's not the first critic to claim that America's 
> copyright lawyers have become pinstriped thought police. Much of the 
> novelty of his book lies in his effort to trace how the intellectual 
> property virus has spread, with tragic results, to the Internet -- a 
> communication network expressly created to allow the rapid dissemination 
> of new ideas. ''An environment designed to enable the new is being 
> transformed to protect the old,'' he concludes glumly.
>
> <snip>

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