Steamboat Willie opens a gap in the New York Times
September 17th, 02007 by Alexander Rose
In today’s New York Times is an article explaining how they are going to open their archives and web site up - sort of. It is indeed great they are taking away the requirement of logging in to see articles, and they are allowing free access to the “TimeSelect” service (previously $8/month).
The most interesting part however is this note:
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.
They put this out there like it does not require any explanation. As though no one might care about what happened between 01922-01987. I would think that the time frame encompassing such events as Prohibition, The Great Depression, World War II, and the conflicts of Korea and Viet Nam might be worth at least a footnote.
I would venture that what happened was Steamboat Willie. The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in the twenties, and therefore the de-facto line in the sand drawn through our culture, from which Disney will never allow Mickey (and by default, anything else) to fall out of copyright. The Disney copyright lobby has done much to keep copyright increasing by more than one year - per year, in order to keep its “intellectual” property safely in their hands. While I am certainly fine with Disney continuing their reign over the little mouse, depriving the rest of us of works of great cultural value, such as 62 years of The New York Times, during some of the most formative years of our nation seems a bit out of whack.
I would assume that after 01987 The New York Times is able to attribute all its work and photos in accordance with modern copyright laws, and therefore are able to offer that (which is actually no small feat). But for the 62 years of unsharable data, there is apparently no good solution. The question that this begs in my mind is… What is more valuable to our culture? An make believe mouse, or 62 years of The New York Times?
This 62 year copyright gap does a nice job of pointing out where our intellectual property laws have become so onerous, that a large and venerable institution such as The New York Times simply cannot clear the rights in their own archive. Much smaller groups and individuals are in an even worse bind, we have lost great pieces of cultural history to this problem such as “Eyes on the Prize“.
I wonder what people will think about this time far into the future? A dark ages — not created by war, famine, depression, or even technological failure, but a small whistling mouse.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:40 am
In my own line of work (as a linguist), an even more worrying instance of issues arising out of ambiguous copyright has to do with research materials collected in the period of time you mention (and a little after). In 1922 (and well beyond) linguists, anthropologists, ethnographers, etc., weren’t generally thinking about the intellectual property issues of the materials they collected, and these days no one knows who has the rights to them in many cases.
What’s striking to me is that, under the watchful eye Mickey, the emerging default attitude towards such materials is that “we shouldn’t let anyone look at them” rather than “let everyone look at them” so as not to harm relations with the communities from which they were collected. But, no one has really done a general or specific survey of communities to assess their attitudes. So, it’s not clear if this is necessary or not.
Why hasn’t such a survey been done? Aside from the obvious reasons (e.g., lack of money), we can add fear. Some people have materials they are using privately and are afraid if they try to find out who has the rights to them, the outcome will go against their interests. The research world runs on open access to information, which makes the spectre of such copyright problems very frightening.
And to add to the complications, even if the law deemed that these researchers did “own” their materials, they are bound by additional sets of ethical obligations to the communities they work, which means even a legal resolution in their favor might not “fix” the problem. When you add these things together, it’s not surprising many people would rather simply stay quiet and put off having these questions asked until after they’re dead.
I won’t be surprised if, in a thousand years, our documentary record of indigenous languages of countries with strong copyright regimes (like the US) is significantly worse than languages of the third world where researchers are not embedded in societies where the intellectual property culture is dictated by the needs of a cartoon mouse.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:45 am
[…] as has been observed the de facto copyright period is however long it’s been since Steamboat Willie, plus enough lead time to allow another extension. (Another trite observation: It’s ironic […]