Does Copyright Deter Social Movements?

Justin- I want to start by saying this an interesting and important idea, one that we don’t think enough about. But noting that—that we don’t think much about how copyright deters social movement, in part by withholding the power of song and voice--- also leads me to what I think is perhaps your argument’s most difficult problem. You note that Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were both able to draw from the “large public domain” available to them; using this public domain, this shared cultural history, they were able to speak to the people in their own voice. It’s a powerful argument, and I recognize the importance of being able to utilize one’s own historical, cultural patrimony to shape the future. After all, what other tools but the past do we have in order to shape the future?

However, I think it’s also important to recognize that the problems that we have with the public domain and copyright control of social movement are, to some extent, self-fulfilling prophesies. That is to say that because we have been denied access for so long to the public domain access becomes less important, at least in terms of creating or empowering social movement. Woody and Pete were drawing on a cultural heritage that was familiar to people. Part of your argument rests on the assumption that social movements are empowered by art’s ability to use elements from the cultural past— to speak to us in a familiar, yet different voice. But the last works to enter the public domain were freed in 1923. It’s hard to argue that a contemporary artist using a work from 1920 today would have the same resonance that, say, African-American slave songs had in 1930 to someone who’s grandparent or parent was a slave. I recognize this doesn’t defeat the core of your argument (in fact, in some sense it supports it), but what I’m suggesting is that maybe this is a dead letter. Maybe this is a concern whose time came and went when the public domain (and its power to make social movement), by virtue of being almost a century removed from us now, lost its ability to truly resonate. Now that this is so, what does copyright take from social movement today, other than the ability to sing songs which are distant and unknowable?

Your argument might be stronger if you focus not on the fact of copyright itself, but on its length and extensions. It seems to me that it is not copyright necessarily that deters social movement, but the distance between the public domain and the presence. After all, current creators who want to allow their works to be used for social movements, both now and in the future, have the ability through Creative Commons licensing (among other mechanisms), to do so. The real problem, I think, lies not in disallowing access to present creation, but in making sure what of our cultural past is accessible to us is too remote to be of use.

-- DanaDelger - 09 Mar 2009