Copyright laws originally came about in the United States around 1790, the thought being to create laws that would protect original content created by giving rights of ownership to their creators. These laws originally saw the sole rights over a work transferred to its creator for a term of fourteen years, and this could be extended for another fourteen years if the creator were still alive. While originally mainly covering books and maps, over time the formats of media included and the length of time they were covered for ballooned. The last change to US copyright was the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act (Also known as the Sonny Bono Act), saw the length of copyright go to life of the author plus 70 years, except in the case of corporations who can claim ownership for 95 years after publication.1 While the idea of protecting authorship and the ability for creators to protect their way of life is a noble cause, the law now extends far past what could be seen as a natural lifetime. This in turn has stymied the public domain, and what new works fall into it, creating a gap from 1999 to 2019 where no new works were added.
In January 2019, Ars Technica reported on the first new content entering the public domain in twenty years. It was expected that another extension would be proposed by corporate media giants such as Disney, whose own Mickey Mouse will fall out of copyright in 2024. With many major characters from Warner Brothers, DC, and Disney set to fall to public domain in the next fifteen years, will we see another legislative push in the U.S. to protect the creative works of multi-billion dollar companies?2 The likely bet is yes.
While these fights are mainly those of large corporations, there is a battle being waged by the people, one of open sourcing projects and locking copyright up into the copyleft, a way of turning copyright law on its head to make sure that works are guaranteed to be free for all to use and see.3 Projects like the Creative Commons and the GNU GPL/LGPL have created licenses that can be adopted for use in order to make things easier to share, or completely public domain depending on the license chosen. These licenses are generally provided free of charge and have been making major headway in allowing for content to reenter the public sphere. There are still issues of access; content has to be stored somewhere, and requires funding. With companies that supported copyleft such as the photo sharing site Flickr being purchased by media conglomerates such as Oath4 (A subsidiary of Verizon that owns AOL and Yahoo among others), there will likely be future fights on different media to protect content rights. Overbearing copyright laws are damaging to the sharing and development of culture, and need to be pared down.
Check out the Creative Commons Video on how a CC license works here.
1https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/s505.pdf
3Coleman, E.G., 2013. Coding freedom : the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
4https://www.dpreview.com/news/8750021028/verizon-acquires-yahoo-including-flickr
anthropology of infrastructure 2019 