Shagging Marmots, Jazz Recordings, and Copyright Law

To copyright?

This week all about the ins and the outs of copyright law.  Cohen and Rozenwieg provided a useful summary that other authors fleshed out.  Grimmelman’s article and the Wiki piece, for instance, provided a broad historical survey (going all the way back to Babylon) of idea of copyright and an overview of some of the intricacies, while Peter Hirtle’s article “Digital Preservation and Copyright” laid out some of the common exceptions to the no-reproductions aspect of copyright law.  Further, in an act of unimaginable cruelty, Dr. Cebula assigned LOC’s “Taking the Mystery out of Copyright,” an anime tour through the vagaries of copyright law.  Although I found myself frequently and involuntarily clawing at my eyes, it did simplify a very complex system, provided a useful history, and the steps to copyright your creation.  Plus, it included the following inspiring ditty:

Copyright protects your creation all across the nation

When it becomes a great big hit, you get all the credit!

... or not to copyright?

Having established the basics, the reading moves along to a lively debate about the temporal aspect of copyright law.  Mark Helprin contributes the article, “A Great Idea Lives Forever.  Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” in which he questions the validity of copyright expirations of any kind, comparing intellectual property with physical property.  Why should Danielle Steele’s heirs be impoverished when her copyright expires in seventy years while the heirs of the Carnegie fortune continue to live it up?  Although Helprin’s argument has visceral appeal, Lawrence Lessig tears in apart in “Against Perpetual Copyright.”  He methodically, pointedly dismantles Helprin’s reasoning, leaving little doubt as to why the law treats physical and intellectual property differently.

A non-shagging marmot.

This is not to say that copyright law is simple; indeed, it is anything but.  Several of the articles expanded on just a few of the complexities, including “orphan” works, “Fair Use,” and the difference between text, images, and video (particularly vexing when they are irreducibly fused on a webpage or in an article).  We learn about the “Trove of Historic Jazz” recordings that very few can enjoy because of the difficulty in determining the copyright holder (click to listen to a few), and the predicament the BBC faces in attempting to make public thousands of three-minute nature clips that include audio elements for which a different entity holds the copyright.  This could be of great benefit to the public, if done carefully.  David Tannenbaum, coordinator for the Union for the Public Domain put it best when he said that they “want to be sure that the archive is more than just shagging marmots.”  Although one wonders what David has against shagging marmots, we can all hope that the archive accomplishes great things.

Having read about Creative Commons for a couple of weeks, we were finally able to dig into the website.  The rebuttal article from Peter Benjamin Toth “Creative Humbug,” however, raised some interesting points: sure all of this Public Domain, free-sharing stuff sounds great, but is it really that simple?  Toth says no, and he questions a number of basic assumptions upon which Creative Commons builds their case.  Does moving content into the Public Domain accomplish much?  Who takes care of the legal end of things (CC doesn’t).  Is there any need for copyright protection to begin with (Toth answers with a resounding “yes”)?  More than anything, it was interesting to read a reasonable, cogent argument against Creative Commons precisely because the idea of pushing so much into the Public Domain seems too good to be entirely true.