Copyright Talk

Or anti-social, or even just plain mean. We tend to collectively cringe at the thought of great art treasures being destroyed, and yet we allow private ownership of art works and the concurrent truth that private ownership means many of those works will be completely inaccessible to most, if not all of the world, merely at the whim of the owner.

So why do we feel so differently about music? Copyfight has an interesting discussion of a film that is basically being locked away from public view because the copyright owners of songs used in the film are asking unreasonable prices for the use of those songs. In this case, by unreasonable, I mean more than the film can possibly generate and therefore, more money than there is available. The take from Copyfight and some of the artistic community is that this is stupid for the song owners to do because it is against their own best interests, and by the way, it wrong to keep artistic greatness from the public.

Well, to that I say “bull whoopee.”

We have no public policy stating the great art must be available to the public. (Priceless paintings are sold to private collectors.) We have no “in loco parentis” system for overriding individuals’ decisions about how to manage their money and property (boy, wouldn’t things run a whole lot more smoothly if we did, though?). And why the hell didn’t the film-maker work all this out before she made the movie in the first place????? I can guarantee that if she had made a movie and then shelved it, she would raise holy hell if a distributor came along and released it without her permission and then told her she would get paid according to what he determined was a reasonable payment, whether she liked it or not.

The bottom line here is that copyright owners get to make the decisions about use of their work (with soem exceptions) and they get to do that even if the rest of don’t like those decisions. If you want to use copyrighted material in your own work, you had better get the permission and details worked out before you go ahead. If you don’t, and your own work is rendered useless, you have no one but yourself to blame.