By: John Haugeland

John Haugeland — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:30:46 +0000

That … is an interesting position.
Right off that bat, I’m not actually the sort to feel that things aren’t original. I understand and sympathize with the viewpoint, and I’m not saying you’re wrong. However, I feel that there’s meritable difference in, say, this year’s adaptation of some well-worn Shakespeare flick: Branagh and Olivier created significant, meaningfully different work in each their Hamlets.
The way I choose to look at it is to maintain a focus on the original intent of the law: to create a temporary monopoly on the work to justify the investment that the author or director or actor or film studio needs to make to get the work made. Writing a great novel, some handful of exceptions notwithstanding, takes a serious fraction of a person’s life. At the same time, society has a right to work with, adapt, share and extend the work. The balance struck between rights of society and practical needs of authorship in renaissance Italy, and since adopted so widely including by our founding fathers, is to allow the authors to set, for a time period outside their control, just what can actually be done with their work, and once that has expired, it’s public domain.
And I mean, given that viewpoint, if we sidestep the issue of what timeframe is correct at first, that’s actually kind of reasonable. On the one hand, it gives creators domain over their work, publishers and funders reason to invest, an aftermarket that can commercially thrive and give more work, et cetera. We like to think of technology as the great enabler of media: film and recording and broadcast and so on. But if you actually look at the timeline of things, the place where content went from zero to hero was when the great masses suddenly stood a legitimate gamble of becoming rich off the work, and therefore had a reason to try.
Does it suck that I can’t just download whatever the fuck I want and watch it over a sandwich for free?
Yeah, of course.
But the alternative is that nobody would be spending hundreds of millions to make these amazing works, because it wouldn’t pay out. Wikipedia lists 45 films as costing $150 million or more; apparently the Pirates of the Carribean series has already had more than a billion dollars spent on making it.
So, we can walk the line of adoption, sure. Pirates of the Carribean is a clearly derivative work. (And I don’t really like it, but I doubt most people would argue that it’s good that an industry can work at that scale regardless of how they feel about those four films, because that same industry produced a hell of a lot of content that appeals to most of us.)
But if we don’t set some kind of arbitrary line where people get to say “I made this, ten bucks or fuck off,” then what’s going to get these things made?

By: dartfulavenger

dartfulavenger — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:42:13 +0000

This article also raises the argument that copyright itself is theft, because nobodies work is original.

Comments on: Dear Mister Harris: Because They Can

By: John Haugeland

By: dartfulavenger