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News & ArtsMonday, January 4, 2010
Books / Film The Public Domain Is Getting Hungry
Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 1:40 PM
* Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye
* Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
* Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451
* John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest
* C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (the fourth book in The Chronicles of Narnia)
* J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories
* Leon Uris’s Battle Cry
* James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain
* Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying
Movies like Hondo, Peter Pan, and Glen or Glenda should be entering the public domain, too. Instead, thanks to the 1976 Copyright Act, absolutely no new books or movies entered the public domain in America this year, and we won't see any new public domain works until at least 2019. Public domain, in many ways, is the fountain that refreshes our culture, and a few select megacorporations, especially Disney, are blocking access to all works because they need to maintain copyright on their intellectual properties.
From folk tales to work songs, the story of humanity is told by the public domain. If this shameless monetizing of our imagination continues like this, we'll be completely choking to death on our nostalgia by 2015, when they remake Starsky and Hutch for the eleventy-billionth time. Pro-copyright apologists may scoff and say that creatives simply need to come up with new ideas, but it's not that simple. Storytelling is always a group effort, even if it's as seemingly solitary an act as writing a novel. This domination of ideas is quite simply unhealthy and wrong. You can read more about the public domain here.
(Via Third Place Books Press.)
Copyright law does not protect ideas: "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea . . . regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work." 17 U.S.C. S 102(b).
Thought:
Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tannebaums" was a very lightly rewritten version of Salinger's stories about the Glass Family.
Why didn't Salinger prosecute?
Thought I might bring up an essay from Robert Mittenthal's blog: http://rmutts.blogspot.com/2009/07/notes…
"A predominant extension of the concept of negative easement can be found in intellectual property, which reduces ideas to property. An intangible object of the intellect is magically transformed into tangible property. Today one can objectify an idea, not only figuratively “bringing it to the body” or “possessing it” (viz. etymology of property), but one may sit on the idea-object for years, preventing others from productively using it. Cognitively and conceptually driven by rules about origin and authority, the notion of intellectual property negatively anticipates and preempts neighborly use."
From an essay on the Spite House show at Lawrimore Project over the summer
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