Frank’s Blog

The Lessig Video

I found this video to be very entertaining, informative and sometimes frightening when Lessig discusses the rapid loss of creativity in our culture. You know what he is saying is true, as you see the public domain laws constantly extending the period of time it takes to acquire free rights to public properties.

If you take the example of Walt Disney, building a creative assembly line of movies based on the classic works of others, and then locking them up so no one can use them for an extended periods of time, seems unfair to myself and others — as stated in KMAP’s Blog (http://thekmap.blogspot.com) - even something as old as Steamboat Willie (the character, Mickey Mouse was based on a character in a silent movie called Steamboat Bill) which was made in 1928 won’t be in the public domain until 2023, that is if they don’t lobby congress to extend it again “. “ If I made a cheap Mickey Mouse Knock off that nobody liked, I’d either be laughed at, flamed or ignored altogether – but what if I redesigned the character and made him much cooler a more appealing than Disney’s Mickey Mouse? Well, that’s when Disney would bother to come after me because now I’m a legitimate threat”.

I believe that when artistic development is manipulated in this way it leaves a void in space and time that can never be filled. That’s how cultures, and the civilizations that are based on them, disappear.

As I was searching through Technorati, I discovered a new website called “Archive.org”, Universal Access to Human Knowledge (http://www.archive.org/index.php), where you can find what intellectual properties have gone into the public domain and you can even download them for free if they have.