DTC 356 Blog #6 .... The Final Take Aways

The most important take away concept of this unit is that our current system of copyright and ownership is not working in our evolving digital society. We learned that the copyright system as we know it today was created for the authors of print media long ago. It was explained in Many articles including  the article “The Musician as Thief : Digital culture and copyright law” by Daphne Keller, that  copyright was set up so that they could make a living off of their creation, and not have to worry about other creators stealing their work and claiming it as their own to make money off of it themselves. This is what it was originally intended for, after the death of the author, the copyright existed to help the family, and then it was no more.

            That being said, as the world evolved and changed in the way society values creations, so has the copyright system. As many of the creations ended up being absorbed into corporations, the copyright laws have changed to favor them. The copyright law changed to the life of the author plus 70

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years. This was changed because of the Disney Corporation. Relatively recently, the characters of Mickey, Minnie and their friends were about to go into the public domain, as they were created by the Disney corporation’s founder, Walt Disney many years ago. However, the corporation refused to let them go, as they are an iconic part of their business…so they were able to get the copy write law changed to an extended period of time. This bought them time until they could get the laws changed to allow businesses to hold the copyright of an item.

You see, at the moment, American Copy Write Law is set up to favor the individual. This excludes corporations, and organizations, no matter what their nature. This has caused issues not only for corporations, but for cultural institutions as well. Copyright does not protect any content if more than one person created it, especially if that content was created long ago. This issue applies to indigenous groups all around the world. Their cultural content, such as symbols, stories, songs, and artifacts cannot be covered by copyright. Due to this, many have been used in ways that are not only inappropriate to how they are supposed to be used, but completely without permission.

This often happens by corporations, and they do not share any of the profits with the groups that created the content. As they are a group that cannot usually pin down who created the original content, it cannot be copyrighted. An example of this is the Maori tribe of New Zealand. In the video “ Guarding the Family Silver” it was discussed how the cultural content of their society was technically in the public domain, and so it was used, improperly and without permission in many different applications. These included T-shirts, car designs, video games and toys. One of the main examples was the Bionicle Toys. These toys used names and other aspects of the culture freely. It turned out that they were being used in a highly inappropriate way. It took a lot of force to get the company to comply and fix these issues.

 In a video game discussed in the movie, there was another instance of inappropriate use. Traditional female chin tattoos where placed on a male character. While it may be a challenge to stop the use of these cultural pieces of content, we need to change the way our society views copyright to aid in the groups that they originated from. While the ultimate goal is a form of true group copyright holdings, the goal for the near future is a set of restrictions on the copyright, such as the Mukurtu program that is discussed in the Jane Anderson video. While a program like Mukurtu does not give the groups copyright of the content, it does allow them to set restrictions on who can see and access what type of information. This would be to insure that the songs, rituals, symbols, etc. are used in an appropriate way.  They would ensure that anyone accessing the information had the correct credentials, such as being initiated up to a certain point, or was the correct gender. While this does not solve the issue of who gains the economic control of sensitive content, it does help to control how that content is used.

            However, there are issues with the copyright system as a whole for non-indigenous content. As of right now, the copyright program is rigid at best, t does not allow for the creator to do anything but take the copyright. This becomes problematic for the creation of new content. Building off of old content creates new content. It has been this way since before the digital age. After all, as Daphne Keller, says in her article, “New art builds on old art.”  However, the current copyright system does not allow this. There is a program working to fight this, called Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows the author of the content to explain how much copyright they want. They can say that their content must be used with attribution, or no commercial involvement, the list goes on and on.

            It is important to have a culture where individuals are comfortable sharing their work. The laws need to be equitable, and fair for all parties involved. That way, our society can move forward. Our society is like Legos, we build off of what has come before us.