The Copyright Wars

Erik writes on the emerging pernicious side-effects of the shutdown of Megaupload. Without taking a stand on file-sharing, I do want to point out this comment:

I would like to see copyright law rewritten to set forth not only the rights of copyright holders, but also the RESPONSIBILITIES: namely, if you can’t be bothered to make your material available, charging what price the market will bear, you should lose copyright protection for that work.

This is exactly right. Most works classified as entertainment will never make the transition from one format to a newer one and thus will no longer be available. If they're no longer available, then nobody is losing a penny by the "piracy" of these works, and copyright ceases to be relevant. I suppose one could argue that any work could one day be revived but the number of times that happens likely approaches zero.

But I remember watching an interview a long time ago with the great Chuck Jones. Jones told of how he had gotten word that Warner Brothers was going to burn the cels the made up the classic WB cartoons - Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the like - so he went to the appropriate person at the studio and volunteered, with his own money, to take the cels and save them. The response was, of course, No. Jones then offered to raise the money to buy the cels outright and save them. The answer? You guessed it. Those invaluable cels were burned.

The point is power and control. Which is why copyright law will not be reformed in our lifetimes. If anything, that power and control will become even more rigid.

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Comments

[gyma]

I may be denser than normal today (been in meetings all afternoon) but I don't guess I see the problem with WB destroying their own property.

By that I mean they have the right to do with their own property as they please. It may have been a bone-headed decision, although I think it's more likely they didn't want the cels to fall into competitors' hands. Or something like.

What am I missing?

[spork_incident]

Of course WB had the right to destroy their own property. The point is, there was no reason to do so as someone was willing to preserve the cels at no cost to them. (Existing - and abosolutely non-controversial - copyright law would have protected them from competitors using the cels and anyway).

The story I related left out a salient fact - WB's decision to destroy them was simply to save on storage costs, no other reason.

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