As I lamented on the Reader‘s music blog Crickets last week, on October 13, Dubya popped out of his burrow to sign into law the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008. Among other things, it creates the position of “IP czar,” or more formally the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative, whose office will coordinate prosecution of IP-related crimes at the local, national, and international levels. It’s the second new cabinet post of Bush’s tenure; the first was Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
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An early draft of the bill would’ve enlisted the Department of Justice to prosecute major copyright infringement cases on behalf of private rights holders, then turned over any monetary award—effectively pressing the DoJ into service as a free legal department for Big Content, at taxpayer expense. The fact that the Bush administration—hardly an anticorporate regime—was sufficiently grossed out by this proposition to demand its removal says a lot about PRO-IP’s baseline level of awfulness.
The need for some sort of intellectual property regime isn’t really under dispute; rights owners ought to be able to insist that their intellectual property be paid for, not simply taken. Big Content got the regime it wanted in large part because it was the only player at the table. Not even the most progressive activists imagined that Congress would ask to hear from, say, a pro-open-source group like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But that doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed they didn’t.
The life cycle of a good song doesn’t end when it’s recorded and sold for the first time. It gets borrowed, recycled, copied, covered, sampled from, and absorbed as an influence. For some of a song’s life span, it costs money to use more than a snippet of it, and it should—when Dylan dropped a batch of tunes that everybody and his dog felt compelled to cover, for instance, he deserved to be compensated. But eventually a song becomes part of the public domain and everyone is free to do whatever he wants with it. The songs that 60s folk revivalists resuscitated were almost all public domain tunes, decades or centuries old, and they provided part of the foundation for the next half-century of Western pop. Traditionally American copyright regulations have respected the public domain, but a few decades’ worth of so-called Disney laws have extended the length of copyright, slowing both the growth of the public domain and our own cultural evolution.
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