As a self-employed web application developer and professional photographer, I understand the importance of protecting one’s intellectual property, and fully support copyright protection as a very important part of that. But some folks seem to want to go too far. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also known as the Sonny Bono Protection Act and the Mickey Mouse Protection Act) extended existing copyright protection by 20 years. Given the increase in the human life span over the last century, it makes sense to extend such protection, in order to ensure that the artist and his or her heirs may benefit maximally from their creative work.
That’s all well and fine, but some people would like to take this to ridiculous limits. The late Sonny Bono (at the time a member of Congress who obviously had a vested interest in extending copyright) wanted copyright protection to last forever. The late Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association of America, wanted to extend it to the even more absurd “forever less one day”.
The CTEA was lobbied heavily by the US entertainment industry, including Disney. Certainly Disney has an interest in protecting its intellectual property, and Mickey Mouse et al. continue to be major cash cows for them. On the other hand, I find it quite disingenuous on Disney’s part to want to extend copyright protection indefinitely. Consider how much money Disney has made from producing animated films based on fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, for example. I wonder how much money Disney paid his descendants for the rights to The Little Mermaid? How about Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Robin Hood? Perhaps there would be no way to extend protection those sources which are already in the public domain or whose authors are long forgotten. But consider that in the Information Age, everything that’s ever written can exist everywhere at once. Who knows, words or images that I create may well persist for decades or longer, buried in someone’s browser cache or server backup somewhere. Certainly I wouldn’t mind it if my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren benefit from my work, but maybe they need to get up and do some creating themselves.
Imagine the other effects indefinite copyright extension would have, especially given our overly-litigious society. An art history book, with its copious reproductions of classic art works, would cost as much as a medical education, once the writer got done paying royalties. Coffee table books would become a thing of the past. Classical sheet music for your child the piano student would go through the roof. Eventually, writers would not be able to string a single sentence together, because someone had already written those same words.
The Book of Ecclesiastes describes this scenario best: There is nothing new under the sun.
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