This looks like a fascinating documentary that PBS is airing on January 19th, and it’s further proof that our current system of copyright is broken.  We need to return to a constitutional copyright.  The one that recognizes that copyright is a balance between the good of the public and the rights holder, but primarily for the good of the public.  We need to get rid of this ridiculous “lifetime + 70 years” and return to a sensible 28 years.  Let’s face it, if you can’t figure out a way to make money from your work in 28 years, you’re probably not going to figure it out, so let it go.  If you do figure it out, there’s little to stop you from continuing to make money from it for the rest of your life.  Plus, you should be saving some of that money (if you had a hit) and you should be creating more hits so you won’t be a pauper in your “golden years”.

People will argue that creators (musicians, authors, etc) will still have popular works after those 28 years (case in point: “I Feel Good” by James Brown) and they should be allowed to profit from them as long as they can (read: infinity).  If this creator is good enough to have one popular work, shouldn’t we expect them to create more?  Wouldn’t that be better for them and the public?  But what about the work that would then be released to the public domain, the creator wouldn’t be able to profit from that any more, since people could get it for free.  Really?  So you couldn’t re-master it and put out a higher quality version than the original you did 28 years ago?  And you think people wouldn’t pay for that difference, especially coming directly from the source and supporting your career?

The reason we have our current disaster of a copyright system is due to Disney.  The squeaky-clean mouse peddler copyrighted its first iteration of Mickey Mouse in the 1928 movie Steamboat Willie.  Once Walt realized Mickey was his cash cow…er, mouse…he began to protect it in every way possible, including manipulating Congress to extend copyrights so Mickey Mouse for forever be the property Disney Inc.

While I understand the desire to protect what makes you money, the purpose of copyright was to give the copyright holder a limited, government-protected period of time when they exclusively manipulate their work for profit, then it would be released to the public domain and anyone could use it as they wished.  This way, the creator gets to make money from creating, they get credit for their creation, they are forced to create more due to the “limited” time, which in turn promotes the “useful arts” and enhances the public good through the creator’s creations.

Without copyrights altogether, it would be a free-for-all!  The creator wouldn’t have any incentive to work, since there wouldn’t be any guarantee they could get paid for their work and/or get credit for it.  The public might get enhanced by creators’ creations, but the creators wouldn’t have any motivation to create, so creating would become a hobbyist industry and the public would be the losers since they wouldn’t have the benefit of well-done art created by people who can concentrate their time and effort on it.

Copyright systems work because of that balance.  Let the creators make some money, then give it over for public use.  The creator gets paid and gets credit, the public gets a steady supply of art, everyone wins.  The current system has been skewed so far to the creator’s side of the equation that the public no longer gets their due.  Thus, dead grandmothers and children getting sued for “infringing copyrights” and works being protected long past any usefulness of the protection or the art.

I could go on for days about this, and I’m sure I’ll write more.  A sensible, constitutional copyright is desperately needed in the US, I hope I live long enough to see it come about.  Until then, check out this trailer for “Copyright Criminals“: