[atlantaprog] Fwd: [ARTNEWS] putting a lock on culture: copyright

Interesting essay on copyright... sure to provoke some strong opinions!

February 6, 2005

You can't say that, because the bullies own it

BY HENRY KISOR
Chicago Sun-Times


The prospect of reading about copyright and trademark law is about as inviting as watching an old lady vacuum in the nude. But the subject is vital for anyone concerned with producing music, art, literature or any other creative medium, even T-shirt graphics.

Fortunately David Bollier makes it easier in Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (Wiley, $24.95). As the title suggests, Bollier is colorfully ticked off at the legal sharks who copyright material that by rights should be in the public domain and, having done so, sue the bejesus out of people who dare to use the stuff without coughing up.

For instance, if you want to use an excerpt of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech -- "a public event that arguably belongs to all Americans" -- you'd better get permission from the King estate, Coretta Scott King and her four children, and be ready to pay for the privilege. And the federal courts, which in recent years have tended to become patsies for intellectual land grabbers, will support the King estate.

It would be nice if everyone agreed that somebody who creates a speech, composes a piece of music or writes a book has the right not to be ripped off. But it's not that simple. Every work of art builds on what has gone before, using ideas and images that entered the public domain long ago. For instance, T.S. Eliot plucked passages from Dante for his great poetry and Marcel Duchamp stuck a mustache on the Mona Lisa for a telling satire. Bollier calls this creative grab bag the "Cultural Commons," and argues that those who plunder it and lock up the loot with copyrights and trademarks are robbing humanity of its ability to create new works of art.

What's worse, many corporations copyright things they obviously oughtn't, simply because they can get away with it. Who can afford to fight armies of well-paid corporate lawyers? Not the impoverished poet in a garret who borrows a small image from, say, a popular song and transforms it into a huge new one.

Although Bollier has an irritating tendency to pile on example after example to make a point, he does regale the reader with jaw-dropping stories. For instance, a Time Warner broadcasting exec once declared that TiVo's allowing users to skip commercials amounted to theft because viewers are legally obligated to watch ads. Taking a bathroom break during a commercial makes us criminals?

Bollier's tale of the lengths to which Mattel went to unfairly squash satires of Barbie dolls is appalling. So is the story of how the owners of the Village Voice -- a liberal newspaper, for crying out loud -- bludgeoned the Bloomington Voice, Tacoma Voice and Dayton Voice into dropping "voice" from their names. (The Cape Cod Voice fought back and won.)

Then there was Michael Batt, the avant-garde composer who was sued for creating a work called "One Minute's Silence," which was exactly that: a moment of nothing. He was charged with infringing on a similar piece by John Cage, a period of silence that lasted more than four minutes. "Mine is a much better silent piece," Batt declared. "I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and thirty-three seconds."

According to Bollier, Batt's mother asked him, "Which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?"

Unfortunately Batt settled, yielding a "six-figure sum" to the other side. It was cheaper than fighting.

A similar book, just published, is Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity, by Kembrew McLeod (Doubleday, $24.95). McLeod is a professor at the University of Iowa and a bit of a prankster -- he trademarked the phrase "freedom of expression" to show how stupid Fox News was in trying to privatize its "fair and balanced" slogan. Of course Fox was laughed out of court by Al Franken, but this sort of thing happens all the time, and people without Franken's fame and deep pockets can't afford to fight.

McLeod is a funnier writer than Bollier (who isn't bad at telling a story) but the latter, as far as this layman can tell, has a better grasp of the complexities of the law.

I do wish both writers weren't quite so one-sided in their mission. They both give short shrift to the fact that people do steal deservedly copyrighted material, and in great quantities. An upcoming book (Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization, by Pat Choate, to be published in April by Knopf) points out that in China, 300,000 legal copies of "Titanic" were sold -- but pirates peddled 25 million of them. In Russia, three out of four CDs are bootleg, and in eastern Europe, 75 percent of software packages are pirated goods. And we all know what happened here with Napster. Those corporate lawyers aren't entirely in the wrong.

One good thing has come out of this foofaraw. We can tell our bosses to go to hell, and because Donald Trump has trademarked the phrase, they can't say, "You're fired!"



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"Before the war it was, I remember, the rarest thing to see someone wearing dark glasses."
Aldous Huxley, the Art of Seeing
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