Apologies for the long hiatus. Among other issues, we took a family vacation and my internet access was limited. Anyway, I'm back.
Yesterday I happened to read a posting on the usually interesting io9 blog (the science fiction branch of the Gawker Media empire) -- this one, about the tension between expansiveness and self-referentiality in serial media. Solid stuff.
And then I read the comments, which veered off into a discussion of copyrights, including a fair amount of gloating about the prospects of iconic media characters like Mickey Mouse or Superman falling into the public domain. There was also some booing and hissing about how the giant media companies have been lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms.
There's plenty of room to argue about the merits of limited vs. perpetual copyrights (full disclosure: I'm with Mark Twain on this one), and I won't go into that. However, I am kind of puzzled about the glee with which people contemplate the idea of Disney no longer owning exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse.
Is it just envy, tricked out as fashionable anti-corporate sentiment? Or are there people out there who actually feel injured somehow by Disney's copyrights? How could that be?
Let's look at some possibilities.
Suppose I'm burning to create my own Mickey Mouse story. Perhaps I have a cool idea for a Mickey comic or film. Well -- if the idea is really good, or if I'm really dedicated and make my own short film -- it just so happens there's a huge media company which really likes Mickey Mouse. I can parlay my Mickey story into a career working for Disney or some of its many, many licensed publishers.
This isn't hypothetical, either. Cartoonist Don Rosa was a huge fan of Carl Barks's Scrooge McDuck comics, and eventually wound up working for comics publishers doing licensed Disney comics. In other media, Paramount's Star Trek franchise was pretty much taken over by former Trekkies.
Okay, you say. What if my "vision" for Mickey doesn't agree with Disney's? What if I want to do a darker and edgier Mickey, or explore his relationship with Minnie in explicit detail?
Well, I can draw my own funny animals and have them do whatever freakish acts I want. Call them Mike and Millie Mouse. There's a whole genre of "furry erotica" comics, and I can probably get them published. "But that's not Mickey!" you say. "Your freedom to show Mickey Mouse doing kinky sex is curtailed by Disney's copyrights!"
True -- but if the only reason to do kinky Mickey is the frisson of turning a child-friendly corporate icon into a pervert, then that thrill is destroyed as soon as anyone can do it! When Mickey enters the public domain, there will probably be a whole rush of attempts to do just that, and they'll all fall flat because it won't be transgressive anymore.
And note that I can write my own Pervert Mickey comic, or even make a film -- I just can't sell it and make money at it. Which means the beef about copyrights isn't that it infringes artistic freedom at all. The problem is that those greedheads at Disney are preventing other greedheads from making money off of Mickey.
If anyone has any ideas about how copyright actually inhibits creativity, please comment and explain. I'm serious; this is a big issue nowadays and I'd love to hear other viewpoints.
I think the issue is less Mickey qua Mickey, but the fact that keeping Mickey safe has the side effect of making it difficult to compile, sample, anthologize, or collect from disparate sources. For example, you want to use some song lyrics from 1940, so you need to go on a lengthy and expensive search for copyright holders or fear expensive legal proceedings. Can you get along without those lyrics? Or course you can. But the writer of the lyrics and music, and the original singer, are long dead. Mickey is a going concern.
And the question for me is not whether copyright inhibits creativity, but whether or not it encourages it. After all, copyrights are an artificial creation that require effort to maintain. If they are merely neutral in effect (not inhibiting), there's no reason to have them.
Posted by: Alexander Jablokov | 03/01/2011 at 08:03 PM
I think the issue is less Mickey qua Mickey, but the fact that keeping Mickey safe has the side effect of making it difficult to compile, sample, anthologize, or collect from disparate sources. For example, you want to use some song lyrics from 1940, so you need to go on a lengthy and expensive search for copyright holders or fear expensive legal proceedings. Can you get along without those lyrics? Or course you can. But the writer of the lyrics and music, and the original singer, are long dead. Mickey is a going concern.
And the question for me is not whether copyright inhibits creativity, but whether or not it encourages it. After all, copyrights are an artificial creation that require effort to maintain. If they are merely neutral in effect (not inhibiting), there's no reason to have them.
Posted by: Alexander Jablokov | 03/01/2011 at 08:07 PM
What Alexander said. The side effect of Disney lobbying for longer extensions in order to keep Mickey exclusive is that everything else gets frozen up as well.
Then there is the irony inherit in the fact that the Disney empire is founded on feature films based on public domain characters and stories - now nobody else is allowed to take that route with anything created later than Mickey.
So I think most people just want for Disney to finally lose their exclusive rights to the mouse, so that Disney then may realize that it wasn't the end of the world for them, and that there's no real need to keep pushing copyright.
Posted by: Kris Åsard | 04/11/2011 at 07:08 PM