Recently, over a series of Saturday nights a good friend had me over his house to show me in his home theater — talk about cool! — two Hollywood productions that he insisted I had to see. The two screenings were ‘Masada’ and ‘Gone With the Wind’.
Sheesh, I really do think the content was better when Hollywood was run by Jews :-)
I remember thinking about what I could do with some of the scenes in a class room. I also remember thinking what I could do with the footage or transcript on a blog. Imagine a blog post, if you will, a short video clip or dialog followed by a content analysis, adorned in the comment thread by a give and take, commenters bringing historical knowledge to bear on the analysis, or making their own, backing their words up with links to relevant material. And that is just one idea.
I can’t begin to imagine everything American creativity — Human creativity — would do with that data, but I bet that among other things, it would revolutionize the way we think about education and would break creative boundaries in the industry of entertainment. But alas, that data belongs to its evil creators and they are not just going to allow the world to use it freely — bastards!
Instead, we will see nothing but re-releases that all but a few have very little interest in. And while the studios will make a little money off that, they will continue to produce mostly lowest common denominator trash, once in while lucking into something worth preserving for posterity. This is a poor use for data of such value in billions of human minds and hands. Imagine the cultural domination.
So here is the idea. The United States government buys all the content produced up until, say, year 1980 to be released immediately into the public domain. It’s paid for by long term tax breaks where possible, and cash where not, and no company is forced to sell. All creative enhancements to the content are the exclusive property of their respective producers, and the people of the world have at it. Disney may hold out, but who else?
And it should come out of the education budget.
Well, there you have it.
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All we’d have to do is go back to the copyright policies we had in the 1950s, and damned near all that content would be in the public domain by now. No need to pay for anything…
Punning Pundit’s last blog post..Least-fun Mario ever…
I’d agree to something like this, although Punning Pundit brings up an excellent point: up until fairly recently, copyrights were only good for 25 years, and you could renew them for an additional 25 years or so if you were a corporation, and that was about it. (Individuals and their estates could keep it going a bit longer). Everything went public domain after that.
The reforms were partially good, inasmuch as you used to have a copyright office you had to submit your work to in order to establish a copyright, much like a patent. Now anything you create is considered automatically copyrighted, which is good. But it appears to be copyrighted in perpetuity, at least if you’re a corporation, and that is bad if you ask me.
By the way, was the “Masada” you watched the one that came out around 1980, with Peter O’Toole? Historically I recall that as being not-very-accurate, but still a rather inspiring story.
Yes, that one. What i found interesting and useful were the dialogs. I kinda saw it as a dialog between the Jewish people and the Roman empire. I could imagine teaching in front of a class what the Jewish people ‘would’ have said, or who was right and how given how the events played out 2000 years later, or simply pretending it was correct, analyzing it on its own terms. Really history as teaching tool is just as effective made up as accurate.
Come to think of it, your ideas are already implemented by the current copyright regime. Education, review, and parody are already “fair use” (within certain limitations Ron Coleman spends his life talking about), and can used as you describe.
Where things get tricky is that while it is perfectly legal to, say, show a clip of a movie on your blog to review the film– it is illegal to break the decryption on the DVD, a necessary first step in getting the clip on your blog. The DCMA thus neutered fair use without changing it in practice. Tricky tricky…
that’s really good to know, PP. I hope to get in on this type of thing in the future.
The important thing, though, is the data processing, you are right.
I would like to go back to something like renewable 25-year copyrights, but the trick now is to get other countries to sign on. Copyrights and patents are governed by international treaties these days. A major advantage of Naftali’s proposal is that a voluntary buyout could be implemented unilaterally by the US government.
Naftali,
PP beat me to it. Using a film in a classroom is indeed “fair use”. In fact, in film appreciation or film analysis classes, teachers will often show entire movies. A friend of mine does just that. He teaches a once a week four-hour course at a local university and begins the class by showing an entire feature film then spends the rest of time discussing/analyzing it.
OK, but might be some problems with the compensation part – which is a small part of why I prefer going back to the 25-year law.
The problem otherwise: some time ago, a major studio was looking to put out some of its old classics on DVD. But the law required paying anyone still living who appeared in the films. Some, mostly musicians, were competely unknown to the studio. Oops!
This is a great thread. I just saw part three of ‘masada’ and i noticed that before the dvd gets to the main content a legal warning written by obviously talented lawyers shows up on a black backround headed by a big font Warning at the top. Can anyone link to a shot of the image or at least the text. I”ll post it and we can look at it and comment……Maybe Ron, who is the master, can even comment or here or on his blogs linked to here.
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