Looking Back

This semester has been challenging for me in many ways because I am very bad with technology. Creating this blog and trying to get it publicity because I am not very active on the internet and do not know a lot about it. The most interesting things that I learned over the course of this class is how greatly the internet has affected our culture and the entire world. It is so interesting to me to consider how vital the internet and technology is in our world today. We rely heavily on computers to do things now that we would never have thought computers would even be able to do in the past. I think that my most successful blog post was probably the post about the group Anonymous. It was very interesting to research and write about, and I think that a lot of people did not know about it until reading my post. Overall, I think that this was a great class and was very helpful for giving me a better understanding of how the internet works, its history, and its role in our modern society

No Copyright, No Problem

Earlier this semester we read an excerpt from Nathanial Hawthorn called Fire-Worship. Hawthorn wrote this in 1846, and in this he writes about his fear that the new invention of an airtight iron stove will change family dynamics and our culture as a whole. In class we compared this to the rise of the Internet and how some believe that the Internet is changing our culture. Many argue that this change is for the better, while others say this change is negatively affecting our modern culture. One of the negative effects that many authors and artists fear is that technology is making it easier to steal and copy their work. Because of this, Congress has extended and expanded on copyright laws in hopes to adapt to the changing technology and protect authors’ work. However, as Lawrence Lessig argues in his book Free Culture, that American copyright laws have been limiting availability and conservation of many great works. According to Lessig, copyright laws are constricting, not only the availability of these works, but also the opportunity to build upon others creativity.

            Eric Eldred was one of the first to begin questioning the copyright laws in the United States when he began taking books in the public domain and putting them online for everyone to read in a website called Eldritch Press. He had hopes of making an online library where anyone had instant access to these famous works. Lessig wrote about his plans saying, “Eldred was producing derivative works from these public domain works. Just as Disney turned Grimm into stories more accessible to the twentieth century, Eldred transformed Hawthorn, and many others, into a form more accessible—technically accessible—today” (213). For the first time works in the public domain were available for free because there was no publisher to produce a hard copy, and therefore, no one to make money off of the work. Eldred wanted to keep adding works to his website after they fell into the public domain. However, this became challenging because, as Lessig explains, “in 1962, Congress began extending existing terms regularly—eleven times in forty years” (236). Each time a famous work, such as Disney’s Mickey Mouse, was about to fall into the public domain Congress would extend the length of the copyright. This way, companies like Disney could keep the rights and money that Mickey Mouse collected. Then in 1998 the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act(CTEA) made the claim that copyrights should be extended to protect the authors. This act says that a copyright will last the length of an author’s life, plus 70 to 120 years. At this rate, anything published in 2013 may not be available for the public domain until 2133. Lessig and Eldred argue that these long-term copyrights are limiting the availability of knowledge and damaging our culture. Many authors have had huge impacts on our culture and should be remembered, but because of the copyright these works are becoming forgotten.

Copyright only protects the commercial value of a work, but over time all copyrighted works loose some of their commercial value. Lessig thinks that the, “noncommercial life of culture is important and valuable—for the entertainment but also, and more importantly, for knowledge. To understand who we are, and where we come from, and how we have made the mistakes that we have, we need to have access to this history” (225). Without access to all of the creative works that are under copyright, we are loosing pieces of our culture one at a time. With the Internet we have the opportunity to create an endless catalogue of books, films, and information that can be accessed by anyone at any time. Copyrights make this impossible because in order to digitize a book or film one needs permission from its owner. Tracking down the owner of these copyrights can be nearly impossible for older works or things like films that may have many owners of the copyrights. Lessig fears that if we do not digitize some of these works then they will be doomed to sit “in vaults gathering dust,” then ultimately decay and be forgotten (224).  The public must buy copyrighted works from the owners, and it is illegal to copy, edit, or build on them without direct permission. The life of a creative work should no end at its commercial value. Lessig feels that this is important because their cultural value will always be greater than the monetary value. Because of this, Lessig claims that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is unconstitutional. He claims that the constitution gives Congress too much power, while it originally was only meant to have “limited” power (236).

Even after filing a lawsuit and going to the Supreme Court himself with many highly respected authors, lawyers, and politicians, Lessig was unable to change Congress’s view on these copyright laws. Could these laws be the end of the public domain as we know it? I went to the website www.copyright.gov in order to see what exactly modern copyright laws permitted. On the first page it lists six rights given to owners of a work, including reproducing written or recorded copies, create or distribute derivatives based off of the work, and publicly preforming the work. If copyrights continue to be renewed and extended, then it is nearly impossible to learn from a work or even be inspired by it. Without the ability to access and use these different pieces of our culture, we are unable to grow and learn as a society.

Just like in Hawthorn’s Fire-Worship, many view new technology as a threat to our culture as we know it. What Congress and lawmakers fail to see is that the new technology of the Internet has already changed our culture. It is up to these legislators to continue to adapt the laws in order to keep up with our changing culture.