Category: issues

“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.”

The US Supreme Court’s decision not to overturn the Digital Millennium Copyright Act throws the issue back to Congress. “The ruling could fuel fair-use debates over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, digital-rights management systems and the regulatory mechanisms surrounding them. Some of the technological mandates being sought in Congress and at the FCC would put fair use in grave jeopardy.”

Earlier this week “representatives of the music and tech industries pledged to oppose government-mandated technology to stop consumers from copying copyrighted songs and video. Instead, the technology and music companies agreed to collaborate on creating their own technical solutions to preventing the swapping of copyrighted materials. Press releases announcing the deal called the agreement ‘groundbreaking.’ At least one news organization followed suit and labeled the agreement a ‘landmark’ in its headline.” But is it a good idea to let the companies themselves decide which rights the public ought to have?

The US Supreme Court, while conceding that a 1998 extension of the Copyright Act might not be good public policy, has rejected the idea that the law is unconstitutional. “The 7-to-2 decision came in the court’s most closely watched intellectual property case in years, one with financial implications in the billions of dollars. A major victory for the Hollywood studios and other big corporate copyright holders that had lobbied strenuously for the extension, the ruling had the effect of keeping the original Mickey Mouse as well as other icons of midcentury American culture from slipping into the public domain.”

Read the majority opinion.

“If Congress may not expand the scope of a patent monopoly, it also may not extend the life of a copyright beyond its expiration date. Accordingly, insofar as the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 112 Stat. 2827, purported to extend the life of unexpired copyrights, it is invalid.”

“The economic effect of this 20-year extension – the longest blanket extension since the Nation’s founding is to make the copyright term not limited, but virtually perpetual. Its primary legal effect is to grant the extended term not to authors, but to their heirs, estates, or corporate successors. And most importantly, its practical effect is not to promote, but to inhibit, the progress of ‘Science’ by
which word the Framers meant learning or knowledge.”

Howell Raines, the executive editor of The New York Times, has made it his mission to reinvigorate the paper’s cultural coverage. “He called the culture section the ‘crown jewel’ of the paper and added: ‘It is as much a part of our signature identity as the foreign report’.” Already the changes have begun…

Word is that “Jodi Kantor, New York editor of Web magazine Slate – has emerged as the top candidate to become editor of The New York Times ‘Arts & Leisure’ section.” Kantor is 27 and has been at Slate for four years. The move signals NYT executive editor Howell Raines’ seriousness about a new direction for the paper’s culture page.