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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 01/16/2003 2:05:20 PM PST by weegee
WASHINGTON (Variety) - Handing the entertainment business an enormous win Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) upheld a 1998 law giving Hollywood nearly a century before having to release copyrighted pictures into the public domain and lose exclusive rights to sell coveted classics.
In a 7-2 ruling worth billions to showbiz, the justices said Capitol Hill was perfectly within its rights when it extended the life of copyrighted works by two decades, from 75 to 95 years.
Industryites say the ruling provides an important investment incentive, both for future projects and for hundreds of existing works. With the explosion of the DVD market, for instance, studios with substantial libraries may now have more of a reason to pour money into reproducing older movies.
"For Hollywood and for Wall Street, it's a tremendous victory on many levels," said O'Melveny & Myers entertainment litigator Robert Schwartz, who wrote a brief supporting the extension on behalf of Congress.
"There's no reason to do a special edition of 'The Wizard of Oz' and dig up old outtakes and find anybody still living who was a part of that movie if it's going to fall into the public domain in two years," Schwartz said.
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who argued against the law before the Supreme Court last fall, argued that the founding fathers intended copyright laws to promote the progress of the arts and science -- not to help media giants such as Walt Disney secure a retroactive copyright extension.
Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti, who publicly debated Lessig, agreed that the extension is necessary in providing incentive for the creation and preservation of creative works.
"That is why this ruling is a victory not solely for rights holders but also for consumers everywhere," said Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America.
Disney chairman Michael Eisner lobbied personally for the 1998 extension law, as the Mouse House was close to losing the copyright on the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons.
For studios sitting on such classics as Paramount's "The Ten Commandments" or MGM's "Gone With the Wind," an extra 20 years is worth gold.
The music biz and showbiz guilds also applauded the ruling.
"The Supreme Court has affirmed the importance of the copyright system and the authority of Congress to adapt it in response to evolving markets and international developments," Recording Industry Assn. of America president Cary Sherman said.
The Writers Guild of America East and West, the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild (news - web sites), the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists (news - web sites) and the American Federation of Musicians issued a joint statement.
"Artists in the entertainment community have a clear stake in the protection of copyright. We are very pleased that the Supreme Court has recognized the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act. We believe the extension is good for artists and the industry," they said.
Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (news - web sites) said the copyright extension in no way violated the First Amendment, protecting free speech, and that Congress used sound reasoning "in light of economic and technological changes and rationally credited projections that longer terms would encourage copyright holders to invest in the restoration and public distribution of their works."
The case was one of the most closely watched of the term, as it was the first time in this country's history that the high court was asked to decide whether Congress has the right to pass retroactive copyright extensions.
Vehemently dissenting from the majority, Justices John Paul Stevens (news - web sites) and Stephen Breyer (news - web sites) said the other Robes were "failing to protect the public interest in free access to the products of inventive and artistic genius."
The case was brought on behalf of Eric Eldred, a book dealer who makes public domain works available over the Internet.
Disgusting to see Big Media play up that this is a good thing for creators. with regards to authors, let their grandkids find their own legs. Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allen Poe are all public domain; do this later creators think that their works surpass these?
If it is valid for the Congress to move the goal posts on copyrights (and retroactively renew expired copyrights), then they can continue to move copyright expirations out with future legislation.
Whatever Big Media paid to get this legislation passed, they got it cheap.
They couldn't get such legislation/extensions through in Europe where copyrights are expiring, so they want customs to block importation of expired works. I knew this would happen as we entered into the age of "talkies" becoming public domain (and rock & roll isn't far off).
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Do you have the same feeling about books? Was the CD-Rom blank?
Don't get me started.....
No, because daVinci's heirs don't own it. The French government does, and it's in the Louvre, and I believe you have to pay them for the right to print reproductions. My point is that every individual original creation with an identifiable creator should be that creator's property, until he sells the work, and the rights to it, to somebody else, who then becomes the rightful owner. I don't have any right to profit from it, nor should I.
I think society benefits from all this too, but it benefits even more from the endurance of private property rights. How would it hurt society if whoever makes that Dickens movie has to pay a fee to the Dickens' estate for the right to use the plot and characters their ancestor invented? If it had been within Dickens' power, he would have done what Walt Disney did, and made theme park rides, movies, t-shirts and everything else using Oliver Twist or Mr. Pickwick, etc. He would have nailed down patents and trademarks in every direction and in perpetuity, if he could (the pirating of his works during his life was one of the things that drove him crazy). This is an issue of individual rights versus the collective, and I think the best place to be is on the side of the individual.
Actually, many of the problems associated with extremely prolonged copyrights (e.g. loss of obscure works before they mature into the public domain, difficulty in tracing the rights even if such a work does survive the decades) would be solved if copyrights required some sort of periodic attention from the holder.
Ok, you got me there. The book publishers are whores too...they just don't gunk the makeup on quite as thick.
Buildings are not a creation of nature, but of people, and they are owned, and transferred, and do not automatically pass into the public domain after some set period of time.
Copyright monopolies are a creation of government.
So what, and why shouldn't the sole creator of some cartoon character have a "monopoly" on it? How come it's alright to steal the product of somebody's sweat and ingenuity if it's a cartoon mouse? Are we communists now when it comes to animation?
Valenti tells us that what the plan on doing is re-issuing the same stuff -- as opposed to being incetivized to create new stuff.
If you want to create new stuff, go ahead - nobody's stopping you. You just don't get to take a free ride on somebody else's cartoon mouse property.
Sidelines such as theme parks are more dependent on trademarks (which can last indefinitely so long as the owner continues to use and defend them) than on copyrights.
This is just semantics. A trademark is a copyright by another name. Both should protect the creator of a distinct piece of work from being ripped off by opportunists.
A trademark is a copyright by another name.
Since you're not using the same dictionary as the rest of the English-speaking world, I'll need to know how you define other words (e.g. "alone", "sex", and "is") before I can tell whether or not I have the foggiest notion of what you're asserting.
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