10th anniversary of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act: Can the good guys overturn it?
If the gurus are right, Americans voters are about to tell Washington next month: “Enough pimping for special interests!”
So here’s a question. Can this apply to copyright laws, such as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, a bipartisan outrage that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1998?
The Act extended the period that Mickey Mouse’s copyright was protected. Corporations like Disney loved it. But thanks to Bono, you can’t read The Great Gatsby and many other classics for free on the Net. Will the late F. Scott Fitzgerald be that much more creative because the act stretched out Gatsby’s term by 20 years? Hello, Saint Mary’s Cemetery?
At Public Knowledge, in reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the DMCA and Bono, Gigi Sohn has noted:
“Suffice it to say that the Sonny Bono Act was nothing more than corporate welfare for big copyright holders. Even a copyright industry sympathizer like Representative Howard Berman has admitted to me that in hindsight he believed that voting for the extension was a mistake.”
Could this translate into action against the act? What kinds? And might commercial interests like Google step up anti-Bono efforts, now that the company has made peace with many book people on a different front? Given all the commercial opportunities related to the public domain, such as print on demand, the act actually harms more than a few publishers.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:26 am
It is of course of special irony that Disney was one of the prime beneficiaries of the copyright extension since Disney was in large part built on adapting works that were already in the public domain.
Copyright is a necessary evil, but it is an evil nonetheless. It should be tolerated by the state and the people only as long as it promotes more creativity than it prevents. Under no circumstances should copyright ever be extended retroactively or extended past the life of the author.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:57 am
I fully understand and support creators making profit from their works, but this act was and is crazy.
It’s exactly like you said, how do dead authors benefit from this?
I would counter that it actually hurts them. Through sites like Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, Munseys, etc, I’ve gotten to know many books that have been out of print for years that I’d otherwise never have heard of.
I’ve found many books that my Mom has mentioned reading when she was a little girl that have been out of print for decades. My kids probably won’t get a chance to enjoy some of the books I like in this way.
Even to use a more modern example:
Jeffery Carver (starrigger.net) has made some of his books available as free ebooks as a promotion for the latest book in the series. I read them and loved them, and went to add them to my wishlist on Amazon only to find that they were out of print already.
And what’s going to happen to such books in 70+ years when the copyright does expire? Will there be any remaining copies to digitize, or will modern authors be completely unknown to the future?
(Yeah, I know, preaching to the choir….
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