BY BEN WINTERS
The Supreme Court has spoken, and they’ve sided with the mouse.
In a case called Eldred vs. Ashcroft, a guy named Eric Eldred was challenging the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, a 1998 congressional decision to extend the terms of U.S. copyright by 20 years–not just for new copyrights, but for existing ones as well.
By a vote of seven to two, on Jan. 15, the Supremes told Eldred tough luck: What congress did was perfectly acceptable, and Mickey and friends will avoid the purgatory of the public domain for a while longer.
The court’s majority opinion, written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, stressed that–regardless of the wisdom of the Bono Act–it was within Congress’s purview to do whatever it felt like regarding copyrights. The Constitution, Ginsburg wrote, "gives Congress wide leeway to prescribe 'limited times’ for copyright protection and allows Congress to secure the same level and duration of protection for all copyright holders, present and future."
It was not an unexpected decision, but, for many, it was very distressing. Among them was Dan Gillmor, who writes a tech column in the San Jose Mercury News. On the day after the ruling, his was among the opinions quoted by the Washington Post’s great online round-up of reaction: "Swipe a CD from a record store and you’ll get arrested," wrote Gillmor. "But when Congress authorizes the entertainment industry to steal from you–well, that’s the American way…Disney and other giant media corporations were the money and muscle behind [the Bono Act]. Who got robbed? You did. I did."
Also unhappy with the ruling, predictably, was Eric Eldred, who appeared in an interview in his hometown paper, the Telegraphy of Nashua, New Hampshire.
"Eldred…predicted that copyright protection of works, defined in the U.S. Constitution as lasting for unspecified 'limited times,’ would, in effect, become unlimited because large corporations would push to extend the copyright whenever valuable properties were threatened," wrote David Brooks in the Telegraph.
"'I think copyright will lose its meaning in the future. Things will be locked up and unavailable to the public forever,’ [Eldred] predicted."
Eldred, who attended the arguments before the Court, saw the whole process as another example of how tightly information is controlled: "It was a good opportunity to use television, to make (the arguments) into educational opportunities for explaining the law to public citizens…Instead, there were lots of inside jokes during oral arguments to their own particular audience, and it was very closed."
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On the other side of the debate, folks like Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America were delighted by the decision. Valenti was quoted all over the place after the ruling came out, saying he was "pleased that the court reaffirmed the absolute authority of Congress to set copyright terms."
Well sure–unlike the Court, you can intensely lobby Congress, which (as Gillmore describes in the Mercury News) is how the Bono Act was passed in the first place.
Go, Cobug, Go!
You might call it a meta-union. Among the announced goals of COBUG, the "Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds," is to increase the amount of media coverage given to its constituent organizations. So far it doesn’t seem to be going very well.
OK, there was the lead blurb in Gordon Cox’s entertainment round-up in Newsday on Jan. 16. "Thirteen unions and guilds, representing every worker on Broadway from actors to stagehands to ushers," Cox wrote, basically quoting the COBUG press release, "have banded together to help promote the health of Broadway and the interests of the workers who keep the industry going."
Cox’s note was basically it as far as print coverage, though the birth of COBUG was also written up on the theatre Web sites, like Backstage.com and Theatermania.com. The applicable rule of thumb here is that anything unions do is small news (until they strike), and theatre isn’t much higher on the journalistic totem pole.
But if the 13 unions involved ("from actors, musicians, playwrights, directors and choreographers, to set, costume and lighting designers, stagehands, ushers and ticket-takers, box office personnel, wardrobe, hairstylists, porters, press agents and company managers") could actually form a coordinated unit and bargain collectively, it could be a tremendously powerful outfit, with Broadway being a huge source of tourism revenue for the city.
COBUG isn’t quite there yet. Cox quotes a spokesman as saying part of the idea of this is simply "to help foster community among the diverse workers who come together to make a Broadway show." In other words, getting the various unions and their 75,000 members to play nice with each other. "'All of the union guilds serve very different constituencies, and the focus of actors may be very different than the focus of some of the blue-collar people in the industry,’ [the spokesman] said. 'Getting people to understand where everyone else is coming from is really important.’"
The Times They are A’ Changing
There was nothing in the New York Times about COBUG, but that may be because the Arts section over there was busy reinventing itself. On Jan. 8 it was reported that former head theatre critic Frank Rich was named an associate editor and moved back to the Arts and Leisure section, from the op-ed page where he’s written a column since 1994. They’ve also named a new culture editor, a one-time foreign correspondent Steven Erlanger.
Sridhar Pappu of the New York Observer interviewed Times executive editor Howell Raines, who was straightforward about his motivations for the moves: Make sure the Times isn’t missing anything hip.
"[I]t’s important for us to dominate high culture in New York: opera, ballet, visual arts–the great institutions that exist here," says Raines in the interview. "At the same time, I think our readers expect us to be as sophisticated and comprehensive on popular culture…to be as good on Hollywood and the music industry as we are on Lincoln Center."