For nearly two centuries, this arrangement worked
brilliantly. There was no lack of creativity on either
side of the Atlantic. But starting about thirty years
ago, large entertainment companies began tipping the
balance from the public domain to the private. Led by the
Walt Disney Company, the corporations pushed Congress to
extend copyright terms, first to seventy-five years and
then to ninety-five. (The extensions occurred whenever
Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain.) One
consequence is that the public domain has been
marginalized; corporations now take from the commons and
give nothing back. Another is that the experience of
culture has been altered; we’re now consumers of
culture rather than participants.
DISNEY STORIES TAKEN FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
Aladdin
Atlantis
Beauty and the Beast
Cinderella
Davy Crockett
The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow
Hercules
The Hunchback of Notre Dame The Jungle Book
Oliver Twist
Pinocchio
Robin Hood
Snow White
Sleeping Beauty
The Three Musketeers
Treasure Island
The Wind in the Willows
DISNEY STORIES ADDED TO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
None
This isn’t to say that corporate art is bad art;
much of what Hollywood produces is astonishingly good.
The trouble is that, with its massive advertising and
distribution budgets, it tends to overwhelm local and
live art. There’s more intimacy, spontaneity, and
experimentation in this kind of art. Local art also
builds community, not only among artists but among
audience members too. The challenge is to have both this
kind of art and corporate art.
One can imagine a culture in which free concerts in
parks, poets in schools and libraries, independent
theaters and filmmakers, and murals and sculptures by
local artists in public spaces thrive alongside corporate
entertainment. There’s no lack of artists
who’d participate in such a culture, or of
nonartists who’d appreciate it. The problem is how
to pay for it.
What we need is a parallel economy for noncorporate
art. Fortunately, models of such an economy exist. For
example, there’s the San Francisco Grants for the
Arts program, funded from a tax on hotel rooms. Since
1961, the program has distributed over $145 million to
hundreds of nonprofit cultural organizations. It’s
a prime reason the city pulses with free concerts,
murals, film festivals, and theater in the park.
Then there’s the Music Performance Trust Fund,
set up in 1948. To settle a dispute with the
musicians’ union, the recording industry agreed to
pay a small royalty from recording sales into a fund
supporting live concerts in parks, schools, and other
public venues. The fund was, and continues to be,
administered by an independent trustee. In 2004 it
sponsored over eleven thousand free concerts throughout
the United States and Canada. Thanks to this system,
sales of corporate-owned music support the living culture
on which the recording industry ultimately depends.
These models could be scaled up. As a revenue source,
consider what companies like Disney get with their
copyrights. They get ninety-five-year protection for
their movies, they get those FBI warnings on our DVDs,
they get the U.S. government extending intellectual
property rights worldwide, and they get police busting
street vendors for selling “pirated” DVDs.
That kind of protection is worth big bucks. Yet the
companies’ price tag for it is exactly zero. (They
do pay taxes, but so does everybody else.)
What if, instead of supplying copyright protection for
free, we charged a royalty on sales of electronically
reproduced music, films, and video games? This could be
supplemented by charging broadcasters for their exclusive
licenses, and advertisers for their invasions of our
brains (see the following section). The resulting
billions could be distributed, through a National Arts
Trust, to local arts councils, which in turn would
support community arts institutions and artists. Under
this system, corporations would give back to a commons
they now take from for free. More art would be live and
local, and more artists would be employed. We’d
have corporate and authentic culture at the same time.
...
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