Posted 5 months ago
For the Love of Culture - The New Republic
I’m nearly a month late, but please consider Lawrence Lessig’s piece For the Love of Culture from The New Republic if you haven’t read it. It’s partly about the Google Books settlement, but it’s also a compelling reminder of how our treatment of libraries—an “accident of our cultural history”—has allowed American culture to flourish. And of how other parts of our copyright system have just as effectively stifled that culture.
To the latter point, witness the difficult task faced by documentary filmmakers in paying for the rights to include “quotations” in their films—usually short video clips from broadcast television. (The fact that they pay for these clips at all came as a bit of a surprise; does anyone seriously dispute that documentary films are not transformative works?) Lessig includes a 2004 quote from the producer of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize:
“[The series] is no longer available for purchase. It is virtually the only audiovisual purveyor of the history of the civil rights movement in America. What happened was the series was done cheaply and had a terrible fundraising problem. There was barely enough to purchase a minimum five-year rights on the archive-heavy footage. Each episode in the series is fifty percent archival. And most of the archive shots are derived from commercial sources. The five-year licenses expired and the company that made the film also expired. And now we have a situation where we have this series for which there are no rights licenses. Eyes on the Prize cannot be broadcast on any TV venue anywhere, nor can it be sold. Whatever threadbare copies are available in universities around the country are the only ones that will ever exist. It will cost five hundred thousand dollars to re-up all the rights for this film.”
People often forget that copyright has a very particular purpose: to encourage artists to create new works for the benefit of society. In the U.S., this is included in the Constitution, which says copyright exists to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Examples like the above show just how broken our copyright system has become.
