Gimlé

They chattered and squabbled like monkeys, tearing things from one another; and one of them kindled a fire in the corner by the cliff, the flame burning strong and fierce in spite of the mizzling rain. The spoils of the sea were dragged up the beach and heaped beside it. The fire cast a ghastly light upon the beach, throwing a yellow brightness that had been black before, and casting long shadows down the beach where the men ran backwards and forwards, industrious and horrible.

When the first body was washed ashore, mercifully spent and gone, they clustered around it, diving amongst the remains with questing, groping hands, picking it clean as a bone; and, when they had stripped it bare, tearing even at the smashed fingers in search of rings, they abandoned it again, leaving it to loll upon its back in the scum where the tide had been.
“Jamaica Inn”—Daphne du Maurier

The currently fashionable subject of copyright and “intellectual property” has been a bit of a personal issue for me for a few years.

Reading through the Berkely Intellectual Property Weblog (found via Scot Hacker’s weblog) brought home something that has been annoying me for a few years now.

I am one of the multitude of people who have a halfway-decent, “widely published in his time”, writer for a great-grandfather. And as anybody who has such a forefather knows, society’s cultural memory is fleeting and ephemeral. History only remembers the top-ten. The remaining cultural figures—however worthy—are lost in the mists of time.

Nevertheless, even though my great-grandfather didn’t win a Nobel-prize like his once roommate Halldór Kiljan Laxnes, I would have liked to make his work available to the public. Maybe work on a translation of one of his plays in my spare time. Definitely release some of those texts to Project Gutenberg.

But, it seems that, despite the fact that my great-grandfather was already dead at the time of my birth, most of his work is still in copyright.

This is despite the fact that nobody in the family has any documentation as to who owns the publishing rights (somebody does, they were purchased a few decades ago).

This is despite the fact that the books have been out of print for more than two decades.

This is despite the fact that, like most writer’s children, his descendants have no interest in earning a living off our great-grandfather’s cerebral corpse, his body of work which—as with most of his contemporary writers—is out-of-print.

His work will come into the public domain sometime around the year 2020 at the earliest.

When I’m 43.

That’s at the earliest.

That is not the only way the current copyright trends affect my life. If I’d want to refer to a two minute scene from “The Third Man” in an essay of mine, I would not be able to include a single frame capture from the DVD in my essay to give the reference some necessary context.

Because the UK is about to pass the local equivalent of the DMCA.

Because that law would make it illegal to break the joke that is CSS encryption, unless the Secretary of State, personally, gives me permission. And if I tell my students how to do it (we’re academia, we need to reference these things) I’d risk going to jail, with or without Secretary of State permission.

God forbid that I do the logical thing and use modern technology to put the short one minute clips I refer to on a cd-rom to accompany the essay, so that the readers of the essay can view the exact scenes in question.

I am in favour of copyright in itself as well as the copyright holder’s right to control distribution of their works.

It is not copyright, the copyright-holder’s privilege or so-called “Digital Rights Management” that is the problem. Sure, DRM is short-sighted and insulting to the user, but it is well within the holder’s right to do so. Just like somebody can piss on a canvas, call it art and sell. He’ll even be able to easily find buyers for that sort of art. As will the recording labels. It’s their call. They can sell anything they want. Whether it is encrypted Westlife or shit on a sofa makes no difference.

Personally, I think that “piracy’s” not the problem either. “Piracy” is arguably at its peak today, no matter whether it is taking place via the “sneakernet” or via file-sharing.

Despite this blatant disregard of the copyright-holder’s wishes, the movie industry is churning in record profits—no matter what paranoid movie producers claim—and the music industry is only posting a 9 per cent drop in sales. Which is a miracle considering that we are in the middle of a harsh economic downturn, potential war against Iraq and a “war” against terrorism.

The RIAA talks as if they are the only ones suffering today in the consumer marketplace.

The most pirated movie in the last few months was “Spider-Man”. Almost everybody I know saw it, during the weeks preceding its screening here in the UK, either after downloading it from the net or by getting their hands on a copy via the “sneakernet” on divx;) cds.

Guess what movie is this year’s blockbuster? They all went to see it in the end.

DRM is not a problem. Piracy’s not a problem. Both exist and will run amok in our society over the next few years, but neither of them are problems. Both are, though, very good efforts at destroying the commercial viability of music and video (DRM being as much of a culprit here as filesharing).

But they won’t be that much of a problem. The entertainment industries will recover and adapt. As will the hardcore copyright infringers.

It is the legislation that is a problem. Perpetual copyright extensions and totalitarian copyright laws are the problem.

The fact that, in a few months, I will have to ask the Secretary of State explicitly for permission if I want to talk about and refer to various pieces of media, is the problem.

The ideal of quotations, something you see a lot of on this website, is now portrayed as wrong. It has been criminalized in spirit, if not in actual fact. Unsound, subversive and callous, the practice of creating and preserving cultural interconnections via references has been exiled from the domain of what is considered proper, prim, polite and right. If the ruling body had any respect for this practice, they wouldn’t have made certain instances of it illegal.

And I’ll be middle-aged when the law will finally allow me show you my great-grandfather’s Poetry and Plays.

They’re good as well. I’m proud of them.

Baldur.

Whatever had been the practice hitherto, there was no method in their work tonight. They robbed haphazard, each man for himself; crazy they were and drunk, mazed with this success they had not planned—dogs snapping at the heel of their master whose venture had proved a triumph, whose power this was, whose glory.
“Jamaica Inn”—Daphne du Maurier

But movies that actually feel like two-hour-plus marketing campaigns are a relatively new phenomenon.
Salon.com—Stephanie Zacharek

She obviously did not see “Jurassic Park” when it came out, then. Or the “Batman” movies.

Or most of the movies that have come out of Hollywood for the last fifteen years for that matter.

It never ceases to puzzle me. Why do otherwise sensible people continue to pay for the privilege of watching a two hour long advertisment?

Baldur.