Rick Falkvinge has another excellent diatribe in his series on copyright and its abuses. This time he examines the common notion that without copyright, artists wouldn’t get paid and would therefore stop producing their art. That’s a powerful argument and one that, unexamined, is very easy to accept. Falkvinge has the figures on how much artists actually get from copyright and who the system is really serving. Definitely worth a read.
There are two other interesting things happening on the front. First, at long last, someone is calling Warner/Chappell’s bluff on their claimed ownership of a copyright on Happy Birthday and is suing them asking the court to return the hundreds of millions of dollars they collected in licensing fees. Almost every expert agrees that Happy Birthday has been out of copyright since the 1920s and, in view of its provenance, was probably never eligible for copyright in the first place. Warner, of course, charges a license fee that is less than the cost of a lawsuit and has been able to persuade users to pay it rather than seek relief in the courts. Those days could be coming to an end and Warner may have to return those fees. Whatever your thoughts about copyright, you’ll have to agree that this is long overdue.
The second piece of good news concerns Sherlock Holmes. All but 10 of the Sherlock Holmes stories have gone out of copyright but Doyle’s estate has claimed that Holmes was a complex character that couldn’t be dismantled into in-copyright/out-of-copyright parts. Author Leslie Klinger sued arguing that the Holmes character was no longer in copyright.
Last June, Judge Richard Posner of the 7th circuit ruled against the estate. This month, Posner ordered the estate to pay Klinger $30,000 in legal fees and described the estate’s actions as a form of extortion. Another excellent result. As I said, whatever your feelings about copyright, there’s no reason to support its abuse.