So This Is How It's Done

I am beginning to understand how things work in this universe:

Government commissions study in the service of the people. Study doesn't support the arguments of the Copyright Pharaohs. Government concludes '<'there was no need for external expertise''. Tries to hide it ever existed. Continues the plot to extract from us the essence of cultural freedom which the Pharaohs have been consuming, and need to consume to extend their decrepitly long legacies for yet another 50 years.

This appears to be the mechanism by which the arterial media of this world have become clogged with the sticky legal deposits created by the circulation of these massive conglomerates.

More Star Wars, anyone? Just be sure that the part of your brain you are storing that in, is not a part from which you are ever planning to create anything in your entire lifetime (or even in your children's lifetimes, should you pass the 'copyrighted' plots and characters, fable-like, on to them).

And most of all — woe betide you online if George Lucas should ever use your name.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]

Copyright Pharoahs Lobby For Immortality

I have to say I don't understand this 95 year music monopoly proposed by EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy. Fifty years was bad enough. But judging by the length of the standard human reproductive cycle, 95 years will see the coming of age of five generations of new artists, all of whom will be denied the right to directly reimagine or reuse today's work without fear of retribution. Am I the only mind boggled by this?

Am I the only one who perceives, common-sense-wise — you do have that on this planet, I've been told — that artists only have a valid claim to preventing 'ripoffs' or the too-close-for-comfort homage among their contemporaries, and that unfettered quoting of their work among the very next generation (not to mention their great-great-great-grandchildren), is not only ethical, but healthy and necessary for the culture itself to continue to vitally reproduce?

Hopefully, in Canada at least, the answer is no, although there is still a significant gap between the stance outlined by the 'Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright' — consumer-friendly as it may seem in this new dynasty we have built of authorial pharaohs aspiring to legal immortality — and the most obvious reasonable course for a society of media-enriched brains. That is, if we are to avoid accidentally enslaving those brains by putting their entire store of cultural memory under lock and key.

[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]