Now it’s official: long copyright terms stifle creativity. If The Economist says so, it must be true: “Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots.”
Food for thought: the original term of copyright in the US was 14 years, renewable for another 14.
Techdirt brings up a related idea: “Fair Use Is Not Enough: Using The ‘Copyright Misuse’ Defense To Protect Free Speech.”
The idea is laid out in a paper by David Olson, Boston College Law School: “…courts could reinvigorate the copyright misuse defense to better protect First Amendment speech that is guaranteed by statute, but that is often chilled by copyright holders misusing their copyrights to control other’s speech…
…by defining as copyright misuse the unjustified chilling of speech that some copyright holders perpetrate, the misuse defense will encourage important speech rights that are currently under-protected. ”
I was startled recently when a lawyer representing an artist’s estate stated, in the course of a regular permission request from us, that they wanted to make sure the copyright in a particular work of art belonged to the estate and had not been transferred to my museum together with the work of art — because it is a “crime” to misrepresent copyright ownership. We made no claim to the copyright; the issue was raised by the lawyer. Interesting, in light of the above-mentioned article, which is well worth a read.
