Disney is awful.

Ironically, I don’t know who the artist for this apropos image is. Accessed from logoblink.com.

I don’t mean awful in the sense that their products have been of grossly questionable quality for a number of years. Which isn’t to say things like UP aren’t awful in the descriptive sense and people are willing to overlook it’s short comings to an astonishing degree because of nostalgia for a time when Disney’s work wasn’t so creatively bankrupt. But that’s another rant.

No, Disney is awful in a very real and more important sense. They are killing our culture. It is the slow, spiteful squeezing of our society’s windpipe until we are unable to breath anymore. And they do this while gleefully sucking in as much air as they possible want.

So what on earth am I talking about? Copyright law.

Now, as a creative person it might seem a little odd or even counter intuitive that I would have an issue with copyright. It is, after all, ostensibly designed to protect my interests so that I may receive due recompense for some theoretical body of work that gets published one day and released to the market. It’s designed so that someone won’t just swoop into this very site, pluck my silly stories about heroic adventurers in ludicrous fantasy settings and sell them on their own without giving me proper value for my work. Which is a noble goal seeing that copyright’s first incarnation appears to be Charles II of England’s rather misguided attempt to try and control what media was being released with the invention of the printing press.

Now, as a creative person, I wholly encourage the protection of an artist’s work so that they may profit off their  endeavors. Creating art isn’t really the same as creating a table as we’re discussing ideas and ideas don’t truly exist in a corporeal fashion. This becomes more and more apparent the further we get from actual physical art. A statue is hardly going to be stolen and it’s  craftsmanship  isn’t something easily replicated. A novel, on the other hand, is quite easy to replicate as you merely have to copy the words and order the original artist made. This isn’t to say that sculpture should be exempt from copyright but I think it demonstrates my point rather effectively. Here are some famous sculptures of our past.

Perseus by Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571)

Perseus with Medusa’s Head by Antonio Canova (1757-1822)

Perseus and the Gorgon by Laurent Marqueste (1890)

What do all three of these works share? Despite being a hundred years apart from each other, they were developed in a time before The Walt Disney Company would prevent them from ever being formed. You see, culture isn’t created in a vacuum. Ideas are shared, expanded, re-explored, re-imagined or often just outright copied but with the creator’s own personal touch. All of these statues are based on the Ancient Greek Perseus myth. Their sculptors did not create the characters depicted in them. Perseus himself was not recompensed for his likeness. Marqueste, Canova and Cellini did not have to fill out a bunch of legal documents, forge specific contracts to licence the image or postures or even need to seek the Greek’s approval in order to make these. They were inspired, perhaps even by each other, and they just created. Two of them after the first copyright laws were coming into form.

And we are all enriched because of it.

The Disney Company, however, would like to see this changed.

First, a quick little sojourn through copyright’s history. When it was first fashioned to protect creative works for artists’ benefit, the length of the copyright lasted 14 years with the possibility to apply for a second 14 year extension. No artist in their right mind would pass up on 14 more years of pay, so it was effectively a 28 year hold on an idea so that the original creator could reap what financial benefits they could before their idea was thrown back into the public domain to be played with as others saw fit. This is fine. It allows the Canova’s and Marquestes’ of the world their own opportunities to fashion statues of naked men holding severed or soon to be severed women’s heads.

But, as Tom W. Bell from techliberation.com so well demonstrated, this time frame is entirely arbitrary and subject to change through his predictive Mickey Mouse Curve.

Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve by Tom W. Bell

So what are we looking at here? This is a graph charting the course of the expiration date of Steamboat Willie as it nears its entry point into the public domain only for new copyright law to extend its duration. To be clear, one can not copyright a character but they can copyright a movie that features the first appearance of said character. That would be the  eponymous Steamboat Willie featuring the world’s most recognizable rodent. Technically, I can use Mickey’s likeness so long as its part of a commentary on a related issue – say if I were to show Mickey Mouse in a satirical cartoon of stomping North American culture. The important thing to note is the length that copyright now protects a work. From something that was originally 28 years has become 50 years then the death of the creator then the death of the creator plus 50 years until our current copyright of the death of the creator plus 75 years.

Let’s take a moment to ponder this.

Current copyright protects a work for 75 years AFTER the death of the person who created it. It’s not even sensitive to the time that the work was made. Let’s jump up to our statuary example above. According to modern copyright, the Canova estate would be eligible for suing poor Mr. Marqueste for his clearly derivative work of his statue Perseus with Medusa’s Head. Had Mr. Marqueste gotten the copyright on the butchering of Medusa, I would not have been able to include an image of his work in a rant on copyright until 1995. Nineteen years ago, I would have been unable to picture a work of art made in a time before colour photography was invented to allow me the opportunity to even photograph it!

We have now created for ourselves a point in cultural development where works can not be touched by the public sphere for an entire generation after it was made. And this is working off the assumption that copyright doesn’t get extended beyond its current term which, I’m sure before 2023 rolls around will be changed again. Just to reiterate, no culture is made in a vacuum. Everything builds upon itself. Shakespeare wouldn’t exist without the prior poems and legends which he fashioned his stories from. Romeo and Juliet was based on an Italian tale translated in Arthur Brookes’ The Tragic Tale of Romeus and Juliet in 1562. As a reminder, the play was first published in 1597. The only copyright law we have which would historically allow arguably the most famous Shakespearian work to exist is the original copyright of 28 years. Seeing that Shakespeare died in 1616, according to Disney’s will, the play shouldn’t even exist at all even if we assume Arthur Brookes keeled over the moment his Tragic Tale hit the printing press.

The ultimate irony is that Disney has and continues to profit off the public domain. Their most recent work, Frozen, is based off Hans Christian Anderson’s highly acclaimed The Snow Queen (1845). Disney has over 100 movies based on others creative works with their most famous and celebrated ripped directly from the same public domain they refused to let their rat enter. Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Hunchback of Notre Dame all owe their thanks to free access to their original work. Which, as I said, is just the tip of the iceberg. 

Finally, let’s remember that the song Happy Birthday to You is actually a copyright work. The owner of this cute little cultural artifact is Birch Tree Group Limited which was acquired by Warner/Chappell Music who to this day enforce their copyright claim and collect about $5,000 a day in royalties for the song. That’s over $1,800,000 a year for a song they had zero hand in creating. That’s right. Every time you sing this song on a relative’s birthday, you are breaking copyright law for a tune attributed to an 1893 kindergarten teacher and technically owe Warner/Chappell Music royalties.  So it’s time you paid up.