Authorship, Ownership and The Law

I think anything that an artist, musician, writer creates should give him/her privileges of ownership, if all components are created by scratch. Privileges of copyright should be for a more limited amount of time than is currently allowed in my opinion.

Lawrence Lessig is a lawyer who will happily go to court over matters of public domain and believes that the current propensity for copyright to be extended to 95 years beyond the life of the creator is unconstitutional, as it locks up so much information that should be freed for others to use after a certain time period. Just as patents allow inventors to profit from their newly created technologies for a time (17 years), and then opening them up to the public fosters greater creativity in society, so should copyrightable material.

I’m not sure why it’s even up for debate that if someone creates a work and it was inspired by someone else’s work (because face it, who’s work isn’t to some degree?), the creator should be compensated for his/her efforts. I feel the exception is when a work is entirely comprised of splicing together elements of other people’s work.

For instance, if someone on Youtube creates a tribute to Hugh Laurie using images from his television shows, and using “I’m Too Sexy” as a music bed for the images, I personally don’t think that warrants the title of “author” or creator on the part of the one who put the video together. Perhaps those creators could be called “compilers” of some sort.

To me those that create mash-ups don’t fully fall into the same category as photographers because even though mash-up-makers are picking music from one source and visuals from several other sources, and making selections as to when each clip stops and starts and in which order it will be placed in the final piece, the “creator” didn’t really use any crayons of his own beyond his editing software. By that I mean, the creator made no active decision about lighting, direction, costuming, sound mixing, etc. He only used other people’s work (Right Said Fred’s music and the cuts of “A Bit of Fry and Laurie,” “House,” or production Laurie’s been in) to compile this “tribute.” The image of Hugh Laurie is something the mashup editor didn’t create and to some degree should be left within Laurie’s control.

I can hear Gaines discussing the tensions concerning “originality” and how the creator always invests something of himself (his mind expressed) in a work. That tugs at the original feelings of the French and later Time Incorporated v. Geis concerning the Super 8mm footage of the Kennedy assassination, concluding that if the author has put some originality into a work, it’s considered original; if he hasn’t, it’s not. “Originality does not imply novelty; it only implies that the copyright claimant did not copy from someone else (Gaines, I believe is quoting Sarony’s suit, 58).” I say, here, here!