Who Owns and Controls the Creative Expression of Ideas

At a dinner party, a while ago, the daughter of one of my friends was showing me her new iphone. She was ecstatic because she could fit over 1000 songs into its memory. Most of which she downloaded for free off the internet as well as movies and TV shows. Someone else said, that’s illegal, what about copyright.

The answer might not be what you think. According to the CBC program, Ideas, their latest podcast, Who Owns Ideas is all about copyright, who controls it and who benefits from it.

Copyright was invented in England at the turn of the 18th century. The Statute of Anne was created to grant writers exclusive rights to their work, to be able to copy it and sell it for a limited time. This new law also encouraged writers and artists to put their work in the public domain for everyone’s benefit. Later, the constitution of the United States endorsed the same law but those in charge of law making were nervous about giving anyone exclusive rights to knowledge and expression of ideas.

They debated the issue for a long time because even though they wanted to encourage people to come to the New World (United States) with their ideas and creativity they were worried about monopolies. Their experience, living in the Old World under a monopolizing monarchy, had taught them that monopolies were dangerous and corrupted the State. Eventually they decided to allow this “necessary evil” as long as the creators only had exclusive rights for a limited time. Copyright, it seemed, was a way to hire smart creative people relatively cheaply to contribute to the public domain.

Originally copyright lasted only fourteen years however, because recording labels, movie studios and book publishers are making a lot of money from copyright the length of copyright has been getting longer. Today copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years.

Many artists are worried, not their work will be stolen and pirated but that their work will disappear into obscurity. Having free copies of their work available on the internet gives them exposure and encourages the public to buy their work.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the link below.

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20081013_8080.mp3