[Upd-discuss] #4 More Copyright

[Michael Hart]

There are reasons most artists works go up in price
when they die, and not all of these reasons have to
do with the fact that they won't be producing more;
much of it has to do with the fact that those money
handlers who sell their works don't want them to be
wealthy enough to ignore them when they want to ask
for more work.

In the area of copyrights, the greatest profit goes
to the publishing industry, from the office workers
who critique the works to the editor-in-chief to an
assortment of those in  manufacturing, shipping and
distribution to the public.  These people get about
95% of every dollar spent on copyrighted works, and
if there were 19 of them needed, and there are NOT,
each one of them would get as much as the creators,
on the average.  Since there are fewer than 19, the
average they get is obviously higher than those who
actually created the works being sold.

Each of these people, from the editors to an office
full of support staff to the lowliest truck driver,
are each guaranteed their salaries, whether profits
are generated by these or not.

Only the creators are out there on their own, not a
salary in sight, no guarantees of any royalties.

Not only is the model described out of balance, but
it is more out of balance than most realize.

The greatest profits now being made on speculation,
not on artistic creation, here is jsut one example:

20 years ago Ted Turner bought the MGM film library
for a couple billion dollars, a bargain price as it
was full of movies on which the copyrights were due
to expire.  But due to fierce lobbying by Hollywood
moguls and others those copyrights were NOT allowed
to expire, and Turner is receiving 20 years of more
and more profits, as these movies are continually a
source of income as they are released on new media,
and also from 20 additional years of revenue from a
series of television contracts, theater showings or
other profit making endeavors.

And not one of the actors, directors, composers, or
any of the other millions of contracted jobs should
expect any shares of the profits from 20 more years
of copyright on Gone With The Wind or The Wizard of
Oz or any of those other thousands of movies, books
or newspapers, magazines, etc. whose copyrights are
owned by corporate interests rather than by creator
interests.  The fact that corporations were legally
allowed to exist as people is perhaps the greatest,
or one of the greatest, mistakes ever made in those
various legal systems we all live under.

Corporate speculators are making more profits today
than the most successful direct creators.

J.K. Rowling, reported to be one of the wealthiest,
most successful direct creators of our time, is not
at all in the same league as Ted Turner.

And the money of people such as Ted Turner is never
going to be used to give just rewards to people who
work creatively in the manner of J.K. Rowling.

These people live in an aristocracy of wealth, from
which only trickles flow to outsiders, and the rest
is destined to stay in those aristocratic circles.

Yes, Ted Turner DID give a billion dollars to those
at the United Nations, but it must be kept in mind,
it was largely the United Nations, through WIPO, in
fact, that generated the pressures that caused that
copyright extension that made him those billions in
the first place.

"What goes around, comes around," as they say:  and
this time it is all too obvious what that meant for
Ted Turner and the United Nations.

Each time copyrights are extended, lots of fortunes
are made and lost, as those who did not do any work
of a real nature receive windfall profits, while an
assortment of people who had spent a portion of the
life and fortunes they had to invest are left out--
their investments and the years of their lives lost
. . .at the stroke of a pen signing a new copyright
extension into law.

Most people have only ever had to deal with this a
single time, as their copyrights were extended one
time from "life +50" to "life +70," but _I_ have a
dubious distinction of having my career uprooted a
second time by the same maneuver and United States
citizens who had lived from 1909 to 1998 were thus
uprooted from their expected rights to some eighty
years of the public domain, in a period of eighty-
nine years.

For someone thinking and working on such scales, a
concept of permanent copyright is more a reality.

Since Project Gutenberg began in 1971, copyrights,
under the U.S. Copyright Acts of 1976 and of 1998,
have been extended to such a degree that 2 million
books will not be eligible for inclusion as eBooks
in our collection, not to mention millions of such
items as newspapers, magazines, music, movies, TV,
radio, Broadway scripts, and many others.

The longer copyrights last, the more they separate
from the act of creation and their actual creators.
They end up as inherited wealth, to be sold off to
the highest bidder. . .greater and greater amounts
of your cultures are owned by corporations, lesser
and lesser amounts by individuals:  even those who
actually created the works.  "Works for hire."

The desired goal is a "rentier economy," in which,
if possible, everything is distributed on a payper
basis, with nothing left to the public ownerships,
not even the public domain.

Even when such works have obviously been stolen as
in the case of the Gustave Klimt paintings hanging
in the Austrian National Gallery, the corporations
and nations running these institutions refused all
requests to return property, even when some direct
heirs of the families have requested it.

Of course, the Venus de Milo is only one example I
could mention, but one that gets very little press.

We are living in a age of decadence, decaying from
the top down, not from the bottom up, as would the
powers-that-be would have you believe; as they say
we need more and more police power to quell masses
that have less and less to lose, while the elitist
powers-that-be have more and more to lose.

The people at the bottom of the pyramid do not get
restless when they are given their fair share, not
withstanding whether the powers-that-be are of the
Capitalist, Socialist, or Communist order, of if a
religious or other movement has taken over.  It is
the same restlessness that drives those at ye olde
bottome of the pyramides, as they know who built a
pyramid in the first place.

When any civilization gets too top heavy, with too
much wealth and control in the hands of too few, a
period of unsettled activity is created, even when
those at the bottom don't realize what happened.

So much weight at the top ALWAYS makes instability
. . .even, or especially, when no one realizes it.

Today as a result of the Great Depression of 1929,
we have more and more checks and balances systems,
all designed to protect against a recurrance of an
event of that nature. . .

But the result is simply that more and more wealth
can be stacked at the top of the pyramid before it
starts to fall, and the power-elite did not learn,
they are going to continue taking more themselves,
leaving less for everyone else:  fewer jobs, lower
pay at the jobs that are left, more a middle-class
tax base, less an upper-class tax base, more wars,
which have been used to cover up local instability
throughout time immemorial, which generates profit
and control for the upper-classes. . .all of which
you should have learned in your history classes, a
long time ago. . .and should be applying today.

How to apply it?

That's what we are discussing here.

So let me leave you with a little story I heard a
long time ago from S.I. Hayakawa, the semanticist
who nearly changed the world around the time when
I was just a kid.

[Story to be included elsewhere, but the point:
at some point you have to stop talking, not matter
how great the conversation, or the conversationalists,
and decide what is the best action to take, and that
usualy action has to simple, straightforward, and
must be effective.]




Notes:


Hayakawa:  Discussion must end, actions must be made.

Melancholy Elephants, by Spider Robinson

Age breeds conservatism.