we're gonna be talking about this one more than a little, and Mujtahid WMR and i have been chewing on this subject for years, so this fatwa will have some elisions and shorthand. to make it clearer, i will say that the subject is the Happy Birthday Problem: how even humming this tune on film, radio, or tv, or even a sufficiently public space, means i'm supposed to send a check to fucking warner brothers. and it's not like they give a cut to the two women who wrote happy birthday; they've been dead a long time.
if you'd like more background on this, i can recommend two great films: Steal This Film, about the founding and growth of the infamous site thepiratebay.org, and Rip: a Remix Manifesto, a movie about (in part) why Girl Talk would have to pay over $4 million an album to "legitimately" use all the samples he uses....and why plants, animals, and sometimes even your cells can be patented and owned by a company whose basic business model could be most accurately described as intellectual property squatting.
anyway, Mujtahid WMR had an idea, years ago, that i at first scoffed at as mere sarcasm, but that, like the idea virus it is, grew and grew until it found it's vector: me talking to you about it. sorry for that, but at least this one is free. here it is: if these companies are going to demand money for 75 years after the death of an author (even if that author has long since been cut out of the process), if their sole intention is to sit on their "properties" until you stumble across the wrong mental domain and have to pay a toll, then the inevitable effect is going to be an intellectual climate increasingly strewn with untouchable wreckage. too expensive to refurbish, too broken-down to be worth the trouble.
and the only way around it, as well as the only way to sell any reform to the idiots who think the words "idea economy" make any sense, is eminent domain. it works the same way it does for actual real estate. you're boppin' along, and you notice a property that is blighted: it hasn't been maintained or used for anything productive, and its' poor state has a deleterious effect on neighboring properties. so you petition for, and are given, eminent domain: the right to take that property and use it for something useful, in exchange for "fair market value." and not the fair market value that says five seconds of christina aguilera is worth $100K, but the fair market value "conservatives" in texas spend on a house they grab for 1/3 of what you could actually get on the market.
conservatives could be led here, for the same reason whores like rick perry have thrown their arms around physical eminent domain: because at some level they realize their politics amounts to abstract philosophy without a toolkit, and they're willing to accept tools that are at odds with that philosophy as long as they can use them to maintain power. and liberals, whatever and whoever they are now, love an idea that sticks it to the man...provided we can pry their hands out of what Mujtahid JB called the "soiled lacy white panties" that are hollywood.
but here's another issue: this idea is kind of smartass, in that it shouldn't really be necessary at all. because ideas aren't really like real estate after all. that is a bad analogy. land does not have to enter my brain to become valuable to anyone, for one thing. the whole concept is absurd. but if we cannot change that fundamental, and fundamentally wrong, approach to intellectual property, then IP eminent domain is a reasonable temporary work-around.
in the longer term, some alternatives might be (stay with me here, these are fuzzy, hippyesque terms, but useful) the "copyleft" movement, creative commons licenses, modified open-source agreements with permissible profit avenues spelled out explicitly...really, the suggestions already out there are numerous, inventive, and invigorating. check 'em out.
in the meantime, in response to those asinine psa-style ads during movie previews (the ones where cameramen and key grips are pimped as proxy for the huge companies that profit from owning nearly everything in your head, wringing their calloused hands about how they'll afford dental care and mortgages), we might also discuss another brilliant idea from M. WMR:
Great Ideas You'll Never Get to See, or, Thanks, Sonny Bono!
you could have cameramen and costumers talking about all the work they'll never get, the projects they'll never get to hone chops on, because of bullshit copyright laws.
i'll start us off with an example, again from M. WMR: All-Star Miami Crime, a show that mixes together every crime show ever set in Miami into one story. miami vice, burn notice, all of it. we get to see how the guy in csi: miami is an incompetent boob who never even noticed Dexter running around in his own back yard. or maybe he's just overworked, what with all the forensic work he has to do every time michael weston and Sam Axe get done blowing shit up.
does that sound like a cool idea to you?
well too bad. it'll never fucking happen.
can you imagine how thrilled all the actors on those shows would be at the prospect of all those additional fans, syndication fees, what have you? how thrilled Bruce Campbell would be?
well too fucking bad for them, too.
please, let's discuss. just because i'm an asshole don't mean it won't be both fun and interesting, to talk about.
I would rather live in a sane world where we scaled back as much as possible the notion that you can own an idea at all. I understand, though, that in order for people to safely profit from an idea they had they must be allowed some sort of limited ownership of that idea. On the other hand, I have to wonder how many ideas are lost because they are vaulted away from the free hands of people who might use them to better purpose than those who own them.
ReplyDeleteThis is the heart of introducing the notion of eminent domain to intellectual property, which may be the only way of ever getting back to the idea of public domain.
I am reminded of the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The initial printing was around 500 copies. It might have become an object of interest only to antiquarian bookdealers but for 2 things: First, the death of Percy Shelley aroused a renewed interest in all things Shelley and second, at least five unauthorized stage productions of Frankenstein sprouted up at the same time. And it is this latter part which I feel makes the point about the poverty of modern intellectual property. If contemporary laws had been in effect then there would not have been 5 adaptations of Frankenstein, there would have been 1 authorized edition. Now, who is to say if that one would have been better than the other 5? How would we ever know? We can't know. But it is in the nature of this kind of loss that we can only imagine what we have potentially lost. Can we quantify this loss? No. But we can surely see in this case that something would have been lost. The quality of the loss is not the point because we can only guess that. But any loss whatsoever should alert us to the dangers of excessive gatekeeping on intellectual property. We don't know what we're losing in the process.