The Public Domain: Star Wars Should be "Deregulated".
22 May 2019 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
I'm not someone who cares about popular
culture for the sake of popular culture but I'm someone who's very sincerely interested in cultural production and how changes in popular culture correspond to the pursuit of political change the real political significance of American pop culture movies music and so on it seems so obvious when we see that culture infiltrating a foreign society especially one in which it's repressed or forbidden right now in Cuba people hand around hard drives with American pop culture downloaded from the internet because they have no direct access to the internet right now in North Korea there is a black market for American movies on CDs DVDs and so on when I was a child before the Internet my father told me about an article I read in some magazine or some newspaper describing how in Saudi Arabia mainstream American films had a political significance that was largely unthought-of by the directors actors and writers who produced those films in the first place so this would have been American movies on VHS cassette I assume being shared from person to person in Saudi Arabia and this article my father told me said that just seeing you know a scene in a courtroom where a female lawyer is yelling at a police officer seeing American movies in which women drove cars and made their own decisions about their careers and their divorces and you know seeing a dramatized depiction of the American legal system could have tremendous significance for people particularly women watching those movies in Saudi Arabia it could be a challenge to everything they'd grown up with everything they've been told in their own system of education now again there's an interesting question about how in North Korea people perceive the outside world in to what extent the black market American movies significant um these same cultural sources these same touchstones have an amazing significance within American culture and yet of course it's much more difficult to discern there isn't any such clear and easy contrast as a repressive regime foreign culture in a foreign language might provide nevertheless there's no question when you look back at the very first of the Star Wars movies we look back at the very different reception of the Phantom Menace now 20 years ago each of these films both shaped and was shaped by the culture that produced it the culture that received it and so on and I'm partly interested in these things partly just because I'm interested in sort of philosophical questions of what is good writing and what is bad writing but I'm also really sincerely interested in the way in which the production of culture is part and parcel of the pursuit of political change now most of the commentary I see trying to ask and answer the question of why were the Star Wars movies so terrible or why were the game of why was the game of Thrones television adaptation so terrible it tends to inflame the question in terms of personal political power of people in in creative and executive positions and hubris the hubris of those people now that story is meaningful in its own way I understand that as a story we tell ourselves some people want to make George Lucas into the villain who basically destroyed the intellectual property that he happened to own destroyed a series of films where really he wasn't responsible for what was good about the original trilogy or at the very first film that other people should have been given credit for that and then we got to see what a terrible author and director George Lucas really was in the prequels that followed so many years later and so on that's a reassuring sort of story we tell ourselves but I'm here reminded of a very different newspaper story I read again about youth I remember a newspaper story dealing with the constant source of corruption and intrigue that was the government's control of taxis in Toronto taxis had always been associated with organized crime very questionable labor unions and they're overpriced and you know all these very strange forms of political skullduggery and this article just quoted people at City Hall asking why don't we just stop regulating taxis why don't we just let as many people who want to have taxi licences have them and remove this whole world of intrigue and corruption why don't we just deregulate taxis now decades later these questions would be asked again as technologies on people's cell phones like uber and lyft ride share technology challenged the right of a small number of taxi companies to monopolize the small number of licenses for who could and who couldn't drive a taxi in this same fundamental sense I'd like to challenge the paradigm that is produced and sustained dynasties of exclusive intellectual property in American culture we are now finally finally coming up to the day on the calendar when Mickey Mouse will become public domain it's been a largely unquestioned tradition in the British Empire United States Canada Australia etc it's been a largely unquestioned tradition that intellectual property should last for 50 years 75 years for some extraordinary number of years from the date of publication or from the date of the death of the author I'd like to challenge that assumption this video what if Mickey Mouse had become public domain just ten years after he first appeared in a film or what if Mickey Mouse became public domain just ten years after his film earned a million dollars let's say they put some kind of threshold exactly what would the effect be on American popular culture what would the effect be today if anyone anywhere in the world had the right to use the concepts the intellectual property of the original Star Wars movie from the 1970s whether 10 years or 20 years after his first published as of just mentioned by the 20-year mark Phantom Menace would already be now in the public domain and I don't even care about the transfer of dollars and cents involved you could have another law requiring that you pay one percent or five percent of the gross earned to the original author but that you'd have the right that it would become non-exclusive that it would become the whole world intellectual property most people think of this only negatively and in a protectionist sense most people think oh no no if you let everyone on earth use Mickey Mouse the idea the concept of character then companies in China will be able to produce their own Mickey Mouse backpacks their own Mickey Mouse handbags toys soon and so forth that's really not the crucial issue here not at all if just ten years after Walt Disney had produced the character of Mickey Mouse anyone could use that character that would then create an incentive for the Walt Disney Company to create new characters new ideas new stories again and again every year and the fundamental sickness that we see playing out with the continued exploitation of the Star Wars franchise the rather tired old ideas the 1970s that seemed to get worse and worse with every reiteration other dynasties of cinematic intellectual property the aliens movies you know so the first one which is called alien without nest unbelievable to me is still being beaten into the ground for just a few million dollars more and sure the whole world of comic-book adaptation movies just imagine if the whole system were restructured in such a way that the fundamental financial incentive was to truly innovate was to truly come out with new characters new stories and new ideas because this whole game this whole scam all of this skullduggery is actually created and sustained only by government intervention only by a legal framework that we don't need that doesn't benefit us as the public and I don't think it benefits people in the creative arts either I think that the total amount of creativity the total amount of work and well-paying employment for creative people would be much greater if Walt Disney were trying to come up with something to replace Mickey Mouse every ten years if HBO had to come up with something better to replace Game of Thrones every ten years this is a very strange form of subsidy the government is involved in that ultimately only enriches dead cultural properties not just literally the fact that the author is may in many cases be dead but that fundamentally closes off narrows and silos the whole world of cart of creative and artistic production when we look forward to the 21st century what we really need to be doing is looking back at the unexamined assumptions of the 20th century assumptions that seem to make sense in a world dominated by newsprint but that now really may just fetter us in a world that increasingly exists online
culture for the sake of popular culture but I'm someone who's very sincerely interested in cultural production and how changes in popular culture correspond to the pursuit of political change the real political significance of American pop culture movies music and so on it seems so obvious when we see that culture infiltrating a foreign society especially one in which it's repressed or forbidden right now in Cuba people hand around hard drives with American pop culture downloaded from the internet because they have no direct access to the internet right now in North Korea there is a black market for American movies on CDs DVDs and so on when I was a child before the Internet my father told me about an article I read in some magazine or some newspaper describing how in Saudi Arabia mainstream American films had a political significance that was largely unthought-of by the directors actors and writers who produced those films in the first place so this would have been American movies on VHS cassette I assume being shared from person to person in Saudi Arabia and this article my father told me said that just seeing you know a scene in a courtroom where a female lawyer is yelling at a police officer seeing American movies in which women drove cars and made their own decisions about their careers and their divorces and you know seeing a dramatized depiction of the American legal system could have tremendous significance for people particularly women watching those movies in Saudi Arabia it could be a challenge to everything they'd grown up with everything they've been told in their own system of education now again there's an interesting question about how in North Korea people perceive the outside world in to what extent the black market American movies significant um these same cultural sources these same touchstones have an amazing significance within American culture and yet of course it's much more difficult to discern there isn't any such clear and easy contrast as a repressive regime foreign culture in a foreign language might provide nevertheless there's no question when you look back at the very first of the Star Wars movies we look back at the very different reception of the Phantom Menace now 20 years ago each of these films both shaped and was shaped by the culture that produced it the culture that received it and so on and I'm partly interested in these things partly just because I'm interested in sort of philosophical questions of what is good writing and what is bad writing but I'm also really sincerely interested in the way in which the production of culture is part and parcel of the pursuit of political change now most of the commentary I see trying to ask and answer the question of why were the Star Wars movies so terrible or why were the game of why was the game of Thrones television adaptation so terrible it tends to inflame the question in terms of personal political power of people in in creative and executive positions and hubris the hubris of those people now that story is meaningful in its own way I understand that as a story we tell ourselves some people want to make George Lucas into the villain who basically destroyed the intellectual property that he happened to own destroyed a series of films where really he wasn't responsible for what was good about the original trilogy or at the very first film that other people should have been given credit for that and then we got to see what a terrible author and director George Lucas really was in the prequels that followed so many years later and so on that's a reassuring sort of story we tell ourselves but I'm here reminded of a very different newspaper story I read again about youth I remember a newspaper story dealing with the constant source of corruption and intrigue that was the government's control of taxis in Toronto taxis had always been associated with organized crime very questionable labor unions and they're overpriced and you know all these very strange forms of political skullduggery and this article just quoted people at City Hall asking why don't we just stop regulating taxis why don't we just let as many people who want to have taxi licences have them and remove this whole world of intrigue and corruption why don't we just deregulate taxis now decades later these questions would be asked again as technologies on people's cell phones like uber and lyft ride share technology challenged the right of a small number of taxi companies to monopolize the small number of licenses for who could and who couldn't drive a taxi in this same fundamental sense I'd like to challenge the paradigm that is produced and sustained dynasties of exclusive intellectual property in American culture we are now finally finally coming up to the day on the calendar when Mickey Mouse will become public domain it's been a largely unquestioned tradition in the British Empire United States Canada Australia etc it's been a largely unquestioned tradition that intellectual property should last for 50 years 75 years for some extraordinary number of years from the date of publication or from the date of the death of the author I'd like to challenge that assumption this video what if Mickey Mouse had become public domain just ten years after he first appeared in a film or what if Mickey Mouse became public domain just ten years after his film earned a million dollars let's say they put some kind of threshold exactly what would the effect be on American popular culture what would the effect be today if anyone anywhere in the world had the right to use the concepts the intellectual property of the original Star Wars movie from the 1970s whether 10 years or 20 years after his first published as of just mentioned by the 20-year mark Phantom Menace would already be now in the public domain and I don't even care about the transfer of dollars and cents involved you could have another law requiring that you pay one percent or five percent of the gross earned to the original author but that you'd have the right that it would become non-exclusive that it would become the whole world intellectual property most people think of this only negatively and in a protectionist sense most people think oh no no if you let everyone on earth use Mickey Mouse the idea the concept of character then companies in China will be able to produce their own Mickey Mouse backpacks their own Mickey Mouse handbags toys soon and so forth that's really not the crucial issue here not at all if just ten years after Walt Disney had produced the character of Mickey Mouse anyone could use that character that would then create an incentive for the Walt Disney Company to create new characters new ideas new stories again and again every year and the fundamental sickness that we see playing out with the continued exploitation of the Star Wars franchise the rather tired old ideas the 1970s that seemed to get worse and worse with every reiteration other dynasties of cinematic intellectual property the aliens movies you know so the first one which is called alien without nest unbelievable to me is still being beaten into the ground for just a few million dollars more and sure the whole world of comic-book adaptation movies just imagine if the whole system were restructured in such a way that the fundamental financial incentive was to truly innovate was to truly come out with new characters new stories and new ideas because this whole game this whole scam all of this skullduggery is actually created and sustained only by government intervention only by a legal framework that we don't need that doesn't benefit us as the public and I don't think it benefits people in the creative arts either I think that the total amount of creativity the total amount of work and well-paying employment for creative people would be much greater if Walt Disney were trying to come up with something to replace Mickey Mouse every ten years if HBO had to come up with something better to replace Game of Thrones every ten years this is a very strange form of subsidy the government is involved in that ultimately only enriches dead cultural properties not just literally the fact that the author is may in many cases be dead but that fundamentally closes off narrows and silos the whole world of cart of creative and artistic production when we look forward to the 21st century what we really need to be doing is looking back at the unexamined assumptions of the 20th century assumptions that seem to make sense in a world dominated by newsprint but that now really may just fetter us in a world that increasingly exists online