Another terrible law is the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Exten-
sion Act of 1998, which extended the length of copyright protection by twenty more years. To put this into perspective, nothing new will enter the public domain until 2019—that is, until Congress likely extends copyright protection again for its corporate campaign donors. Previously, copyright law was written in such a way that, between 1790 and 1978, the average work passed into the public domain after thirty-two years. Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig notes that this honored a constitutional mandate that copyright protections should last for “limited times,” something today’s Congress interprets quite liberally. U.S. copyright protection now stretches ninety-five years for corporate authors, and for individual authors it lasts their entire lifetime, plus an additional seventy years.
Copyright protectionists argue that extending a work’s copyright ensures that there will be an owner to take care of it. But the opposite is often true. “Long copyright terms actually work to prevent a lot of stuff from being preserved,” argues film archivist Rick Prelinger. “There’s a lot of material that’s orphaned,” he tells me.
“It’s still under copyright, but the copyright holders are gone, or we don’t know who they are. The copyright could be obscure.” Many archives won’t preserve a film if they don’t know who the owner is, which means there are thousands of films, records, and other fragile works that aren’t being protected because nobody knows their status. “The interesting thing about film, what’s actually scary about film,” Prelinger tells me, “is that the term of copyright is now longer than the average lifespan of film as a medium. So you’ve got this film in a cage and you can’t get to it until the copyright expires, and the cage melts down. But in the meantime the film may disintegrate. That’s a real issue.”
John Sorensen, a high school friend and an independent docu-
mentary producer who has worked for A&E and PBS, shares
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Prelinger’s concerns. “From the perspective of a historian,” he says,
“after spending a lot of time looking at film and photo collections from the early part of the century, one realizes that the things that still exist, the images that are chosen to be preserved, are those images that are perceived by corporate or government bodies to have potential value. So the visual record that is kept is totally subject to the laws of the marketplace.” Of the works produced between 1923
and 1942—which were affected by the Bono Act—only 2 percent
have any commercial value. This means we are allowing much of our cultural history to be locked up and decay only to benefit the very few, which is why some have sarcastically referred to this law as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. If not for the Bono Act, Steam-boat Willie, the first appearance of the rodent, would be in the public domain.4
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY V. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION®
When companies try to use intellectual-property laws to censor speech they don’t like, they are abusing the reason why these laws exist in the first place. Copyright was designed to, as the U.S. Constitution puts it, “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Copyright exists—and the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently repeated this—
as a means to promote the dissemination of creative expression, not suppress it. The overzealous copyright bozos who try to use the law as a censorious weapon mock the idea of democracy, and they step on creativity. As culture increasingly becomes fenced off and privatized, it becomes all the more important for us to be able to comment on the images, ideas, and words that saturate us on a daily basis—without worrying about an expensive, though meritless,
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