Copyright

I’ve never really thought about the copyright. I thought that the point was to secure the rights of the person, or company, creating something. As I read Lawrence Lessig’s article in Wired, titled “May the Source Be With You” (sigh), I realized that the most important thing with copyrights is to ensure that those people and companies actually do create those things.

If there were absolutely no protection for the creator, he or she isn’t very likely to publish what he or she creates. Then again, if there was full protection for the creator, this would cause a monopoly situation and because, as Lessig writes, “creation always involves building upon something else”, fewer things would be created. So copyright is there to ensure that things are created, for the benefit of the society as a whole.

Then, of course, the length of copyrights must be very carefully balanced: too long or too short, and fewer works are produced. The trend now seems to be to extend copyrights, and the motive of the Eldred v. Ashcroft website is to challenge the Copyright Termination Extension Act:

“Over the past forty years, Congress has extended the term of existing copyrights 11 times … The biggest supporters of these laws are individuals and corporations with extremely valuable copyrights that are about to expire (for example, Mickey Mouse). ... Just as Walt Disney used the works of the Brothers Grimm to produce some of the best of the Disney stories, so too should the next Walt Disney be able to build upon the stories told by Disney.”

Reading Lessig’s article made me think that the copyrights, when they are extended to insane lengths of time, create something very similar to multi-level marketing (MLM). MLM basically is about this: you start as an MLM sales person, at the lowest point of the food chain, and your aim is to get sales people below you in the chain, because you earn a commission on everything that they sell. Soon, you can just sit there and collect commissions, since all people below you pay commissions to you.

It’s perhaps too far-fetched an analogy, but I was tired when I came up with it. But there’s some truth to it, with people like Disney, sitting very high up in the hierarchy, collecting commissions from you, the one who would benefit from more creativity in the world.