Copyright Extension: A Way To Protect Hollywood From Having To Compete With The Past
from the makes-sense dept
There has been plenty of talk over the years about why we keep extending copyright. Of course, we've discussed the infamous Mickey Mouse Curve, showing how copyright extension always seems to happen whenever Mickey Mouse is going to hit the public domain.
However, Julian Sanchez notes that this doesn't explain the whole story. After all, if it was just about protecting the very, very small number of works that still have commercial value after so many years, then you would think we would have evolved away from the "copyright absolutely everything for as long as possible" model, to one that plenty of people have suggested: one where there are regular (and perhaps escalating) recurring fees to keep renewing your copyright registration. That way, works like Mickey Mouse could stay covered by copyright, but all the other works which have been otherwise abandoned can actually contribute back to culture and be used by anyone who wants to make something with them.
As Sanchez notes, you would think that even the Disneys of the world would like this model better. Even if it had to pay such recurring fees, the overall cost will ultimately be tiny compared to the value of the copyright. Plus, it would then open up a treasure trove of public domain material that they could use in their own works -- and Disney, in particular, has a well known history of making use of public domain works.
So why do we still have a "copyright everything for as long as we live, plus 70 years" (for now)? Sanchez posits a compelling theory. That Disney and other big copyright holders like this, because it keeps them from having to compete with their own back catalog:
Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release? In some cases, no doubt. But when the baseline is that we already have free, completely legal access to every great album, film, or novel produced before the mid-80s—more than any human being could realistically watch, read, or listen to in a lifetime—I wouldn’t be surprised if our consumption patterns became a good deal less neophilic, or at the very least, prices on new releases had to drop substantially to remain competitive.This story certainly fits with Disney -- who famously decides to completely stop selling certain old classics and put them "in the vault" for a while, pulling them off the market entirely. For Disney, it's all about keeping out competition, which it wouldn't be able to do if copyright didn't last so long.
This actually reminds me of the missing 20th century of books that we discussed a few months back, highlighting how the amount of new works from each decade drop off rapidly the further back you go, until you hit 1923 -- the current cut-off for the public domain.
Sanchez does note that it's possible this actually drives more investment into new works, since they don't have to compete with the old. And, if you believe (which he doesn't) that new works automatically have more value than old, then you could make a twisted sort of argument that this kind of protectionism, and effective locking-up of about a century's worth of creativity, does "promote the progress" in that it moves the focus to newer works, rather than older ones. But I don't buy that at all. It ignores the fact that the giant gap doesn't just represent competitive works, but also raw material and inspiration for all kinds of amazing new works -- which are effectively killed off.
That gap represents lost culture. But, for the big legacy entertainment players, it might also represent repressed competition. That shouldn't really be surprising. After all, that is the whole purpose of government-granted monopoly privileges.
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Filed Under: competition, copyright extension, julian sanchez, mickey mouse, public domain
Companies: disney
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This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
Or they can take existing material (comic book films seem to be popular since the current special effects make things easier to do these days compared to when Superman came out), license it (MARVEL), and then claim 'copyright infringement' on any knock offs or fan additions...
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Re: This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
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Please, Hollywood. Leave my Arnie flicks alone. You've already ruined Conan.
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Re: Re: Re: This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
They make these things because people go see them, even though 99% of all sequels are crap.
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What's next?
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Re: Re: This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
I guess that means that every possible movie idea has already been made. Nothing new and original remains.
Since nothing new remains, I suppose that means no new copyrights are needed for nothing new that will be created.
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Re: Re: Re: This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
No, it means that Hollywood has lost the ability to be creative. It has become a risk-avoiding culture that seeks the relative security of remakes and proven franchises.
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They make what can be easily marketed to people who are easily duped. The marketing departments are calling the shots.
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It's quite amusing really. Point it out to them and they'll try and turn it around and paint us as the hypocrites though.
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Re: This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
How many remakes have we seen of the PD character Sherlock Holmes in the past 30 years? (several films, three different tv series)
Snow White? (two different movies this year alone)
Wizard of Oz? (several projects in the works)
Jules Verne or HG Wells books?
If anything, allowing properties to fall into the public domain seems to ENCOURAGE creativity (not to mention lots of work for actors, technicians, writers, directors, etc)
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Re: Re: This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
How many of those remakes have spawned infringement issues due to overzealous enforcement by the new 'rights holder' (since they claim copyright on their version) taking out other versions of 'public domain' works or totally unrelated material that includes these public domain characters, with the CLAIM that they are infringing on the NEW version....
SSDD..
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Re: Re: Re: This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
Its like, do I want another star wars, or do I want something new like Farscape gave me?
For me, Ill always go for the new so long as its good.
Sequels, remakes, new spin on old characters etc are boring to me. There's simply nothing I find exciting about a new Wizard of Oz, or Sherlock Holmes or Snow white. But then there's also nothing exciting about Battleship, etc either.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: This allows them to 'remix' the past and resell it.... who wouldn't want that?
According to Wikipedia, the top 10 grossing films in 2011 were as follows:
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (second part, sequel, based on a book)
2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon (sequel, based on toy line, etc.)
3. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (sequel, based on amusement park ride and unrelated pirate book)
4. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (sequel, based on book)
5. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (sequel, based on television series)
6. Kung Fu Panda 2 (sequel)
7. Fast Five (sequel)
8. The Hangover Part II (sequel)
9. The Smurfs (based on television series, comic)
10. Cars 2 (sequel)
I'm wondering how many films released lately are actually original...
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On the flip side, I can stay home and watch the excellent Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, read the latest novels from my favorite authors or get online and play the latest online video games (though games don't really feel all that fresh lately either, but still better than what has become the worst era in Hollywood history).
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Sorry for my crappy grammar. lol
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But as a consumer I only care about two things, that its good, and its appealing. I don't care how long it takes, or how risky it is. I also don't want quantity, as I have plenty of other entertainment options.
Remakes aren't appealing to me after watching them being retold time after time.
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On the ot
her hand back when... oh I suppose about when the Smurfs were on TV the first time or so when I had way less money, spending a far larger percentage of the money on myself rather than others and still no problem accessing free copies of anything if I chose I'd estimate that if you produced a similar list from that time the amount I spent on them would probably be about the same - i.e. £100-£130 today allowing for inflation.
Wonder why that is...
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Hey! You can't make a Snow White movie or story or fansite! Snow White is copyrighted!
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But in reality I think it's more about creating artificial scarcity in order to boost sales in the short term. But doing it with a larger catalogue so it's a bit more sustainable practice.
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It almost certainly does. Can you imagine how poor as a people we would be if everything we got now was just a reprint of a 30 year old book?
As for the cutoff in books in the 1920s, have you considered that little thing called the great depression, followed by world war 2? That hole has way more to do with what was going on, and not some magic shift in copyright.
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Nowhere in the debate did anyone advocate the stopping of new works.
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The chart is the number of new editions of books on the shelf TODAY, from those various decades. So books that are in the public domain are all over the place, while the oldest copyright covered books are not found very often.
Meaning, there are more companies reprinting books from 1910 decade today than there are companies printing books from 1920 decade.
"Can you imagine how poor as a people we would be if everything we got now was just a reprint of a 30 year old book?"
Can you imagine how rich we would be if anyone could expand on works created 30 years ago? Imagine all the movies, other books, comics, game etc that people could make using those properties if they didn't have to seek permission and pay exorbitant licensing fees.
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Without those sorts of numbers to match up, there is no indication why these numbers are the way they are.
Further, let's consider: What is the actual demand for books from that time period? Was it a classic period in literature, or was it one of those times when things were not just all that good?
You really need to know what is out there and what was written and published during those times to understand what is really going on.
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Sure there is some merit to looking at the actual content from those eras but it is hard to consider that 70 years of content is just not worth the trouble of printing.
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Maybe you'd better look at the effect of WW 1 & 2 on European publishing...
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Are you implying that the Great Depression, which started after the market crash on October 29, 1929, but which didn't really get bad until a year or two later, somehow affected the number of books published in the proceeding ten years?
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Or a remake of a 30 year old movie. Oh, wait...
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Your logic doesn't follow. You're assuming that nobody would make new books without copyright and we know that is just plain false. Those that are just out to milk works for all they can may just reprint public domain books. However, people will not sit idly by and be happy with a stagnant supply of books, they will want more and new. Either the author will have to write more or people will write their own and share them.
"As for the cutoff in books in the 1920s, have you considered that little thing called the great depression, followed by world war 2? That hole has way more to do with what was going on, and not some magic shift in copyright."
That's a load of fallacy. That chart refers to reprints of books authored in the 20th century, not how many were authored in the 20th century. It would follow that there aren't many reprints of 20th century works because it is harder to get the licenses to reprint them because they are copyrighted, whereas the pre 1920 works are not. You logic also fails to hold true when you look at the decades following the great depression. Even up to the 1980's, there is a deficit of books being reprinted from original works. The supply of authorship isn't deficit, the reprints are. You're just plain wrong.
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yes, but if there were less books authored during that period, there would be less books also republished.
Copyright isn't the old thing at play here.
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[citation needed]
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Could it be that this period was not particularly powerful for literature?
How many books were published on those years? What are the numbers relative to the time periods?
Without that information, you cannot draw any conclusions - unless you are a rabid anti-copyright person trying to turn ANYTHING into a reason to bash copyright.
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You sure are trying hard to say it absolutely isn't copyright. You keep saying it can't be because of "this" and "that", but when I point the fallacy of your argument, you just backpedal and come up with an even more vague reason that it can't be true. And you even throw in an ad hominem! Just who is grasping at straws?
"...unless you are a rabid anti-copyright person trying to turn ANYTHING into a reason to bash copyright."
LMFTFY: "...unless you are a rabid baby killer trying to turn ANYTHING into a reason to bash copyright."
Yeah, it bears the same level of intellectual integrity.
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Uh huh... well since as usual you're going for the "wild supposition to deny the evidence without presenting any yourself" schtick, here's some anecdotal information:
Authors from ~ the 40's:
Yes, I see... clearly not one single famous and well-loved and read author in that lot. Yep, that definitely explains why there's only 40 or so currently published titles from that decade.
Oh, in case you were wondering, personally I've not heard of about 1/2 that list but I happen to own probably around 70 books by the ones I have heard of, which probably represents less than 1/5 of their total output. I'd also be suprised if as many as 1/5 of that list were still alive when I first read one of their works. So much for literature of that period having no readership value....
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Issac Asimov alone published 506 books from 1950 to 1996.
So no, there was no lack of literature created in that time. Certainly 300 or so books is insufficient to represent the output.
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Actually, both the publishing and movie/radio (there was no tv) industries were booming during the Depression and WWII.
People wanted something cheap to take their minds off the "real world".
Slick magazines/pulps/comics and movies were less than 25 cents for hours of escapism.
During WWII, creatives were often given special dispensation because their work was considered vital to the war effort by boosting morale!
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Sorry - that theory doesn't fit the data.
On that basis you would expect the inital falloff to occur later than is observed and the graph should also come back earlier - no later than the late 1950s - not 1990.
Next time try proper scientific analysis - not wishful thinking.
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http://www.booksonbowls.co.uk/decade.html.
Now admittedly this relates only to books about bowls - but it would be very surprising if books about bowls were booming whilst the rest of the publishing industry collapsed.
You will see that the number of books published shows a steady rise during the depression, falls off slightly during the war (but still above pre-1920 levels) and then comes back strongly.
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That time period was also the dawn of a massive surge in Scifi and Fantasy works. Many that laid the groundwork for almost all scifi and fantasy books/movies/tv/stories we have now originated during this explosively creative period.
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And then you realize that every book, song, image and movie produced up to and including this exact moment are freely available to anyone with an Internet connection, and that plenty of people still pay a premium for content. (That is, when they are given a reason to buy.)
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It's easy to intuit why new creators don't want to compete with older cheaper works. If given the choice between paying $35 for the Avengers blu-ray or just streaming something from netflix...my choice is clear.
But, I don't think I've ever seen a model were artificially limiting competition somehow produces higher quality works or services.
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Limiting competition means you can produce lower quality work, because you have less high quality work to compete against you.
Hollywood would like their movies to be the only choice, and go to your average Redbox and that's all you'll probably find. But Netflix is filled with independent and foreign films - all competition for Hollywood product.
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There's clearly an upper bound to how much content can consume. Namely, there's only so many available hours in a life to consume content.
I wonder if someone can calculate what the average person in America needs given the need to work, eat, sleep, etc.
Obviously as more options become available it's tougher for any single content creator to grab money. I guess the legacy people find this as bad. But, tough, that's how markets work.
I'd also be curious as to where the money goes. If piracy magically stopped - how do the legacy players think that all that money would go back into music/movies?
Given the savings rate in America it's clear that we're not just saving it for when we're forced to pay for stuff. It's most likley going to other entertainment choices. (though, given the obesity rate, maybe one could argue it's going to fast food?).
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Silly pretense.
There are already cord cutters that seem perfectly satisfied with what is available on Netflix. You also have others that find OTA broadcasts adequate. The bulk of either of those is content that should rightfully be in the public domain right now.
If the public domain were as it should be, the P2P sites would be full of legal content. They would be like free and legal versions of your local non-network reruns channel.
A lot of people would find that more than adequate and it would be perfectly legal.
If you are more demanding, you could just buy stuff outright with the funds that you would otherwise spend on cable.
Either way, you can turn your back on much of the new stuff.
Classics from any age versus today's mindless tripe.
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This is true, but that pricing is based on a flawed (and fairly bizarre) business model.
Remember, the studios get their cut of the money regardless of whether you get a movie off blu-ray or netflix. The reason why the price is so much higher for new movies is because the studios are trying to make back the massive amount of money that they sunk into the movie, and they're trying to do it in a hurry. Each time they release a new movie, they're trying to make a whole lot of money off it very quickly -- it doesn't seem like they ever prioritize making less money over a longer period of time.
Personally, I've always suspected this is linked to studio's apparent inability to tell which films are worth making. There's simply no rational basis for it; in a single year, most studios will release some good movies (that have a high chance of being watched for years to come) and some bad movies (that are just crap, and almost instantly forgotten). As a trivial example, look at the list of films released by Paramount in 1997: they released Titanic, Good Burger, the Rain Maker, Kiss Me Guido, Volcano, and Private Parts. It's pretty clear that their model with new films is to throw a whole bunch of shit at the fan, and see what sticks to the blades -- but this also means that they can't rely on movies earning lots of money over time, because they can't tell which movies people will actually want to watch more than once.
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Given how formula driven the industry is, you would expect that they would, by now, have figured out how to produce/distribute content with a higher overall win rate.
What is the underlying root cause? If you could articulate the answer to this question, you could rule Hollywood.
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A handful of companies own most of the content the U.S has produced. The smart thing for them is to hoard as much as possible and then see what they can make money on; and more importantly, they're the only ones that can make money on content.
Most of our culture is sitting in corporate vaults inaccessible and unseen. It's likely these corporations don't even know what their vast holdings contain.
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Availability of free works "undermines the market" ?
In fact this inspired me to write a blog post very similar to Sanchez's with the title "Protective tariffs against the history".
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Re: Availability of free works "undermines the market" ?
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Number of books printed has increased each decade...
As a general comment, probably 95% of everything ever published never gets reprinted until it enters the public domain. It's crazy that the US keeps extending the copyright period just to keep a handful of works out of the public domain.
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You pay for what you don't get
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As for the graph illustrating how copyright terms have expanded over the years, the so-called Mickey Mouse Curve, it too is devoid of context. The US signed on to the Berne Convention in 1988, and in 1989 passed the Berne Implementaion Act, almost 103 years after the Berne Convention entered into force. In 1886, when the Berne Convention was first adopted, the stated terms of years for the duration of copyright was, if my memory serves me correctly, was for at least the life of an author plus about 30 or so years after the author's death. The United States did not accept a Life+ term until January 1, 1978. Importantly, US participation in Berne bounced around the Congress starting about 1962, at which time Disney's "Steamboat Willy" was only a few years into its second term and had almost two decades remaining. To even suggest that the change from 56 max (28 initial term plus 28 extension if requested and requirements met) to Life+50 was driven by Disney does not appear to square with the legislation's timeline. Maybe it did influence the addition of 20 years under the Copyright Term Extension Act, but it must be noted that Act was driven in part by the then provisions of the Berne Convention. In fact, even the DMCA was driven in part by the provisions of the Berne Convention.
Yes, Disney and many others, large and small alike, have benefited, and continue to do so, by term extensions, but to call the graph the Mickey Mouse Curve is a misnomer, likewise devoid of context and, most importantly of all, history.
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This is a random sampling of 2500 books from Amazon's warehouse of new books. They are not used, they are not returns. They are newly printed books.
The data was generated by a student using a web-crawler to scrape data from Amazon. The web-crawler was fed a series of random numbers which it used as indices to find the books, so the sample is properly classified as a double-blind* psuedo-random sampling.
*Books can't be anything but blind.
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video
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For example, it shows that for the decade comprising the 1990's only 120 or so book titles are available for purchase (not to mention there is no breakout for bound volumes, e-books, and audio books). Something does not compute when a decade averages out to only 12 titles per year. To me it takes a leap of faith to suggest that the extension of copyright terms is a good indicator that copyright bears any relationship to what is associated with book titles from the 1990's. Moreover, why the large jump for the decade comprising the 2000's, a level substantially equal to the 1900's and 1910's?
Without some some detailed breakdown of book titles and the form in which they are available, It seems to me the most that can be said it that the chart bears a striking resemblance to a part of a suspension bridge like the Golden Gate in SF.
Perhaps if the lecturer ever publishes his work in a journal article some of my questions may be answered. Until then the most that can honestly be said is that a chart has been presented, and that somehow linking the chart to copyright terms is merely speculative.
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