Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter The Public Domain? The Data Says... No | Techdirt

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-10-01

Summary:

t's getting to be that time again, when Mickey Mouse gets closer and closer to the public domain -- and you know what that means: a debate about copyright term extension. As you know, whenever Mickey is getting close to the public domain, Congress swoops in, at the behest of Disney, and extends copyright.  Copyright maximalists make a variety of arguments as to why such copyright extension is necessary. We've long argued that, even if you believe that longer copyrights are good, at most they should only be applied going forward, rather than retroactively. After all, the stated defense of why we have copyright in the first place is to create the incentives for creation -- and once that work has been created, it's clear that whatever incentive there was -- whether via copyright or other external incentive -- worked just fine. Extending a copyright on an already existing work, creates no new incentives for works already in existence.   However, maximalists have come up with a typical list of reasons for why they believe that copyright should be extended, and we should expect to start hearing those arguments made public again shortly, as the debate reemerges. Among the usual arguments are that (1) no one will produce those works any more, because the incentive is gone without the ability to exclude competition, and thus we'd have 'under-exploited' works. (2) Quite contradictory to the first item, that because there's no way to exclude, the content will be 'over-exploited' because now everyone can use it, and thus the works will be everywhere, diminishing the value of the works. (3) That the works will be 'tarnished' because once in the public domain, people will take the characters and... do bad things with them -- whether it's producing significantly inferior versions, or creating derivative works that somehow take away from the value of the original (such as by putting Mickey Mouse into pornographic situations).   Some new empirical research suggests that... none of these arguments are even close to being supportable. At all..."

Link:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120926/20003120523/do-bad-things-happen-when-works-enter-public-domain-data-says-no.shtml

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.pd oa.books oa.audio oa.studies oa.debates oa.libre oa.copyright

Date tagged:

10/01/2012, 15:16

Date published:

10/01/2012, 11:16