Copyright: A quick explanation (Dada IIa)

I was going to wait several weeks before tackling the elephant of copyright. However, time seems to have caught up with me, and I want to at least present the key questions/themes in what will become a recurring discussion in this blog. This presentation may seem a bit sporadic, to which I have to humbly apologize; but future entries will provide more coherence and glue.

The initial question to ask is: Who does copyright serve? This is a fundamental question that has evolved over the past couple hundred years in America, and even more hundreds in Europe. To remain in an American context, we find the Consitution stating: 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 (Article I, Section 8). There. There it is. Copyright serves the Progress of Science and useful Arts ("useful" meaning ?) Once copyright stops serving the Progress of Science and useful Arts, it becomes unconstitutional.

Is the Progress of Science and Useful Arts issued a copyright, then? No, of course not. It's given to a Creator, who can do what they want for a limited time, then becomes public domain. Because the Creator will lose a sizeable income from material that becomes public domain, they will have an incentive to Create More. This may all seem like review from the past week, but I want to stress how copyright (and other "intellectual property") serves the Progress of Science and useful Arts.

Taken directly at face value, the Constitutional excerpt is government-mandated monopoly. However, the underlying principle (The Progress part, or incentive) exists upon the completion of the limited term. If I created a hit song, and could only sell it exclusively for 14 years, I would have to make another hit song in that time, if I wanted to make any money later in life. Given this, copyright serves progress not through its initial piece, but the secondary piece created under the premise of a lost income.

The glorification of the individual, acting as the salmon racing up the industrial stream, provides the paradigm shift in thought about copyright. Mark Twain began the push for American copyright to meet the standards of Europe, and imagined a day when copyright would be pushed beyond the age of the Creator "to provide for one's daughters [e.g. - Twain's children]" But to reiterate a paragraph above, where is the incentive to further create if one is set for life by a single piece?

Secondly, what are we doing with our copywritten material? If I write a bum song, but someone else finds a use for it, how have I served the progress of useful Arts? Or, from a better vantage point, what if I've written a song that once was useful, but whose copyright has outlived it's "natural" life? If someone finds a new use for it, can I claim infringement?


YES!!! This is what happened in the early 80's in the Hip-Hop community. Rappers would use old LP's as material for the new songs, and would be sued by long-dead groups. Courts ruled in favor of the oldies, and hip-hop has now been forced to background their material by bland, uninteresting MIDI (worse yet, the LP's were not arbitrarily chosen; they found deep significance between their raps and their backbeats). This is an example of Copyright acting against the Progress of Science and the useful Arts. This is an example of Unconstitutional Copyright.

To add another perspective to enforce my point, my brother sent me an article from Mother Jones:

FOR INCLUDING a 60-second piece of silence on their album, the Planets were threatened with a lawsuit by the estate of composer John Cage, which said they’d ripped off his silent work 4’33”. The Planets countered that the estate failed to specify which 60 of the 273 seconds in Cage’s piece had been pilfered.

And John Cage's music will become public domain in 2062. Unless Congress expands copyright again.

...to be continued...

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