“The movie and music industries have succeeded in lobbying lawmakers to allow them to tighten their grips on their creations by lengthening copyright terms. The law has also extended the scope of copyright protection, creating what critics have called a ‘paracopyright,’ which prohibits not only duplicating protected material but in some cases even gaining access to it in the first place.” So writes NYU graduate magazine journalism director Robert S. Boynton in a New York Times magazine article this morning.
The entertainment cartel has taken less than a decade to decimate the cultural heritage of the entire society. The cartel has accomplished it’s goals by methodically warping Thomas Jefferson’s notion of copyright as a necessary evil as outlined in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution, giving Congress the authority 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.” As a result of this decimation, the flow of creative works entering the public domain has been systematically reduced to a trickle. As Lawrence Lessig notes, in 1973 more than 85 percent of copyright owners elected not to renew their copyrights. The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act lengthened copyright terms for an additional 20 years and applied the extension, retroactively, to existing works.
Boynton points out two changes — the first in the 1909 Copyright Act; the second in the Copyright Act of 1976 — that are crucial in today’s digital environment where perfect, exact copies of anything fixed in any media can be created in the blink of an eye:
“Before the 1909 Copyright Act, copyright was construed as the exclusive right to ‘publish’ a creation; but the 1909 law changed the wording to prohibit others from ‘copying’ one’s creation — a seemingly minor change that thereafter linked copyright protection to the copying technology of the day, whether that was the pen, the photocopy machine, the VCR or the Internet. In 1976, a revision to the law dispensed with the requirement of formally registering or renewing a copyright in order to comply with international copyright standards. Henceforth, everything — from e-mail messages to doodles on a napkin — was automatically copyrighted the moment it was ‘fixed in a tangible medium.'”
These changes set the stage, according to Boynton, for what he calls today’s copyright bonanza.
Boynton goes on to explore those resisting the intangible land grab, suggesting that the first new social movement of the new millennium is being formed around these issues.