“In effect, the Supreme Court’s decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.”
Blog
The New Class System
“There is a big academic debate on social class as opposed to income. There are sociologists who argue that social class is in decline in regard to lifestyle, consumption factors and politics as coherent, meaningful groups.” One study finds that “lumping people into big groups like the ‘working’ or ‘middle’ class on the basis of their incomes ultimately had little to do with what they bought, what they watched or whom they voted for. Rather, cultural and political similarities are more likely to be found among people who are in the same profession or do the same type of work, reinforced first by educational training and then by work experiences.”
The Culture Minister With Lots Of Big Opinions
Kim Howells, the UK’s minister for tourism, film and broadcasting has been pronouncing on culture – that the Turner Prize winners are a disgrace, and that rap music incites violence. Does he “regret shooting his mouth off so regularly, or does he see it as his role to make challenging statements on cultural themes? “I haven’t really been shooting my mouth off. What I’m concerned about is a coarsening of sensibilities. People think that makes me a fuddy-duddy.”
Putting The NY Public Library On The Web
The New York Public Library is testing a database that will put images of much of its collection online. “At its inception, the Image Gate database contains approximately 80,000 images spanning a wide range of subjects. This number will grow as The Library digitizes more images; this phased rollout will end in 2004, when the site will include more than 600,000 images.”
Lots Of Buyers But Not Enough Funding – What’s Wrong With This Picture?
People are lining up to go to Scottish arts events. But there’s a funding crisis. “What explains this bizarre paradox? Money is cascading into arts events, yet nothing is more wearisomely familiar at this time of year than ferocious in-fighting among arts organisations and angry rhetoric about ‘mean’ and ‘philistine’ politicians starving theatres, opera houses and galleries of vitally needed funds. Yet, all around, more money than ever is going into the arts. So what is going wrong?”
Copyright Extension – What We Lose
Lawrence Lessig, who argued to overturn the extension of US copyright before the US Supreme Court, writes about the Court’s rejection of his arguement. “Missing from the opinion was any justification for perhaps the most damaging part of Congress’s decision to extend existing copyrights for 20 years: the extension unnecessarily stifles freedom of expression by preventing the artistic and educational use even of content that no longer has any commercial value.”
Theatre Cancels Show When Critic Decides To Attend Preview
When the George Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey found out that the New York Times was sending a critic to review a preview performance for its new show, the director decided to cancel the performance. The theater’s staff contacted all 166 ticket holders for the performance to tell them of the cancellation. Says the director: “When it became clear to me that the artistic process was going to be violated and that trust between the press and the theater was going to be violated, I had to put a stop to it. I had no recourse. I could not turn this individual critic away from the performance; that would be discrimination. But I could stop the performance.”
That’s Rich – Frank Goes Back To A&E
So is Frank Rich’s move from the New York Times’ Op-ed page to the A&E section a promotion or a demotion? “Knowing that I had no interest in running a department and never had,” Rich says, NYT editor Howell Raines said “he would exploit my ideas to advise him and a new culture editor.” Which makes Erlanger the manager and Rich, essentially kibitzing, a sort of “nanny-in-residence” to the former Berlin bureau chief, as one Times reporter put it.
What’s Next
“Some on the public interest side are tempted to lament what could be called the ‘Dred Scott case for culture,’ unjustifiably locking up content that deserves to be free. In fact, the ruling gives public interest activists both motivation and ammunition in the continuing battle against the excessive expansion of the power to control information and culture.”
Truth About Consequences
“Who got robbed? You did. I did. Who won? Endlessly greedy media barons will now collect billions from works that should have long since entered the public domain. Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one – a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries.”