Copyrights for the undeserving

Please don't sue me Universal Studios

            If I learned anything from our readings this week, it’s that sometimes copyright laws are good, and sometimes they are bad. Sometimes it’s purely about money, and sometimes it’s about protecting the integrity of that which is copyrighted. We get a sense of this dualism through an example out of Digital History, when the authors explain that in order to use a brief clip from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) “the representative explained that the company charges a flat rate of $1500 per fifteen seconds of footage” while “Paramount whom we asked about Saving Private Ryan (1998), said they would not license it for use on the web at any price. And Fox wanted us to pay $100 before it would tell us what a clip would cost. Warner Brothers, by contrast, said we could freely use three-minute clips from The Dawn Patrol (1938) and Casablanca (1942) as long as we used no more than two per film”(pg. 216)

            As this example shows us, even within particular industries, there doesn’t seem to be any consensus on how to go about copyrights. If one wanted to use the entire movie, All Quiet on the Western Front, they would have to pay roughly $882,000. Apparently no price is enough for Paramount to use Saving Private Ryan while Fox remains a mystery, except if I have to pay a hundred bucks just to know how much it costs to use their movies, I’m not too confident that it’s going to be cheap. Who is making these decisions based on artistic integrity? And who is basing these decisions based on money? The ultimate question that we eventually arrive at is can there be two different, yet equal standards when it comes to copyright laws? Should we treat a movie as a piece of art or a commercial enterprise?

Give me all of your money

            Mark Helprin had an interesting take in his article. As he elaborates in his own words, “were I tomorrow to write the great American novel, 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren…why, when such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart, it is brought to bear against legions of harmless drudges who, other than a handful of literary plutocrats (manufacturers really) are destined by the nature of things to be no more financially secure than a seal in the Central Park Zoo.”

            I’m not too sure if I’m making a point or not, but then again I can’t help but feel more confused about all of this after doing the readings for this week. Naturally I don’t think it should be about greed, and if someone’s making money off of Mark Twain whose to say it should be either the publisher or his bloodline, when after a certain period of time, neither one of those groups really deserves it. Maybe all the money should just be given to charity.

            Regardless, as usual, I’m putting my blind faith in Google, with the hope that they’ll figure it all out. Thanks Google.