C.G.P. Grey’s short film Copyright: Forever Less One Day tells the story of copyright, with special emphasis on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
One consequence of the Sonny Bono Act: the final three volumes of the recent Penguin edition of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time cannot be published in the United States until 2018, ninety-five years after Proust’s death. These volumes can be had from Amazon, which also sells Sonny Bono’s And the Beat Goes On and much, much more.
A related post
Mount Prost (the Penguin edition, suitable for climbing)
Friday, September 2, 2011
The story of copyright
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comments: 12
I'm not sure which is the more egregious assault on our culture: draconian copyright law, or And The Beat Goes On. Either way, thanks a lot, Sonny.
Another booby prize of copyright is that, if the copyright for something is owned by a publishing company or a film studio, it can effectively be kept out of circulation until the work goes into the public domain, 100 years after the death of the person who created it.
As holding companies get bought by other holding companies who often don't know the literary, musical, or artistic value of the stuff that came with the publishing house they bought for really cheap, culturally worthwhile stuff can simply fall out of circulation without anyone knowing where it went, or why.
Off topic, but happy birthday!
Next time you watch a movie with a birthday cake scene in which they sing "You Know What", make sure to watch the credits. To your horror you will notice that this moronic ditty is still under copyright protection, and the composer's heirs receive big fat royalty checks. This offensiveness of this "tune" is compounded the its noxious kudzu-like ubiquity, as it has supplanted respectable local natal-day songs in other countries, as vulgar American pop culture washes across the world like a tide of dirty dishwater (vive Jack Lang!).
Do you suppose patent attorneys hire spies to troll playgrounds to catch children in the act of parodying copyrighted music so that they can bill the parents?: "da-da-DA-da-DA-da, You belong in a zoo. You look like a monkey. And you smell like one too".
Far better lyrics in my estimation. The tune with the original lyrics makes me want to barf...
Funny you should mention that song, Norman. (Yes, it was my birthday, with several non-public performances, in person and by telephone.) The Wikipedia article on that song notes that the publisher claims that it’s under copyright until 2030. I was wondering yesterday how widely known the zoo/monkey version is. I guess the answer is “Very.”
Thanks, everyone, for the comments.
Oh, and RL, thank you for the extra b-day wishes. :)
Just got an evil idea: what about transposing le chanson infâm into a minor key, in dirge time to boot, and singing the monkey/zoo lyrics to it? Would we still have to pay royalties? Aren't parodies protected too?
I think such a song would be protected. How about these lyrics? You are older today. You are older today. You are older than ever. You are older today.
Brilliant!
While it's true that one could sing this song to anyone anytime the year, as aging is a continuous, not continual, process, its sentiments are least appreciated on the day the number changes, i.e., when the sad fact of our increasing decrepitude is more in mind than usual...
What do you mean our? :)
All right!
...the sad fact of one's increasing decrepitude..
it's what I meant ;-)
Now I’m thinking of “Chard Whitlow,” Henry Reed’s parody of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
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