What Congress Robbed Us Of in 2013 with the Copyright Law

In keeping with a mini-series of tech-minded posts, since I've got tech on the brain at the moment, I'll take a second to lament the excellent works that should belong to We, the People, but don't - because of Congress's awful tech policy (the exact manifestation of which is copyright law, in this instance).

Recently, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke put together its annual list of books that would have entered the public domain this year, if not for the ridiculous copyright laws passed by Congress in 1976 and 1998. Among the books that should belong to We, the People, are such excellent works as:

• Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume I and Volume II
• Philip K. Dick, Minority Report
• Ian Fleming, Diamonds are Forever
• Fred Gibson, Old Yeller
• Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues
• Alan Lerner, My Fair Lady
• Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
• John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
• Dodie Smith, 101 Dalmatians 

How about the movies that We should own?

• Around the World in 80 Days
• The Best Things in Life are Free
• Forbidden Planet
• Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
• It Conquered the World
• The King and I
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 remake by Alfred Hitchcock of his 1934 British film)
• Moby Dick
• The Searchers (1956 film version with John Wayne from Alan Le May’s 1954 novel)
• The Ten Commandments (1956 version by Cecil B. DeMille, who also directed a similar film in 1923)

As I've posted before on this blog:

So, this means no low-cost access to these (and tons of other) works; no Norton Critical Editions to advance scholarship, learning, and understanding; no competitive imitation; no derivative works (like translations, musical adaptations, and dramatizations); and no free e-book versions to put on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad.

Now, I am all for authors and other creative types being able to make a living off of what they do, but U.S. copyright law as it exists is a perversion of the Founding Fathers' intent for U.S. copyright protections. Copyright law, as laid down by the Founding Fathers, existed to protect temporary profits on works in order to encourage those same authors to produce more works, not to guarantee authors and their heirs 100+ years of income from a one-off hit.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution empowers the U.S. Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 fails the sanity test, then, since no reasonable person should interpret the Framers' "limited Times" to mean "to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier."

By comparison, the Copyright Act of 1790 granted copyrights for 14 years, plus an additional 14 years if the author was still alive and applied for a copyright renewal. Here's how the term of copyright "protection" has grown over time:

There is no excuse for this, other than the Walt Disney Company's existential terror at the thought of losing their monopoly over Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and such characters. It's funny how, ever since Mickey was dreamt up, U.S. copyright has been repeatedly extended shortly before Mickey was to enter the public domain, eh?

So, instead of fostering the production of creative works in order to increase the collective cultural and intellectual wealth of the Republic (which was obviously the Framers' intent in the Constitution, since they subjugated the rights of "Authors and Inventors" to the "Progress of Science and useful Arts"), Congress now protects the monopoly profits of immortal corporations and authors' estates (i.e. the authors' less talented offspring) in near-perpetuity - for example, under the current law, any intellectual property created in 1923 or later will not be eligible to enter the public domain until 2019 at the earliest.

Why do We, the People, stand for this?

Just two short months ago, I had a brief, fleeting vision of the possibility that the U.S. might implement a sane copyright regime - but no, the House Republican group that proposed the reforms turned tail and ran like the cowards they are when the RIAA and MPAA lobbyists went berserk.

So, there continues to be bipartisan spinelessness when it comes to implementing sensible copyright laws in the US that are in line with the Founders' wishes about copyright - that the point of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," not to "ensure perpetual corporate profits from intellectual property." We're also not going to get any help from the Supreme Court - surprise surprise (why do we still have a Supreme Court anyway? It seems so very useless).

What's to be done to save (or, perhaps more accurately, resurrect) the public domain? Unfortunately, the only solution at the moment seems to be to elect pro-copyright-reform politicians - of which there are apparently none.