Reading about the situation of copyright in the US (and the world, really, to a certain extent), I’m starting to appreciate that the creative industry incumbents are about to achieve a feat of a framing exercise. They seem to have managed to equate, in the public view, the expressions “importance” and “monetary value”. The layman might be tempted to conclude, from hearing of the copyright situation, that works with no monetary value for an investor should go into the public domain. Picasso’s Guernica and Dr. Suess’ Yertle the Turtle have an undeniable social importance, at least, through their influence on future creative works. That is to say, Picasso’s Guernica, locked up in a box, out of the public view, in someone’s living room, loses a lot of its importance, yet none of its monetary value. The careful balance to be found, then, is between the importance of a work as a product to be sold and its importance as an influence on the development of culture.

I may not be making a lot of sense, but it seems to me this opposition between corporate (in a loose sense) and social interests is not well explained to those less familiar with copyright law. Letting that happen is letting businesses frame the issue as “if I can still make money off of it, then it should remain mine. Once it has no value, it should go in the public domain.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we need a catchy leitmotiv with shocking images that strongly carries, in 10 words, the fact that our grand-children’s bedtime stories will be made up of today’s copyrighted cultural works. Pushing to an extreme, one could say that by our modern standards, cultural evolution is nothing but copyright infringiment.