by Mike Gray

Copyright laws are a gray area, with courts sometimes offering contradictory rulings here and there.

Rumor hath it that Disney Corp. (sometimes derisively referenced as “Team Rodent”), seeing the coming expiration of their copyrights, chipped in a few million here and there to their lawyers to persuade government to extend them into perpetuity—can’t have Mickey Mouse making money for some other entity, don’t you know.

The result has been a major distortion of what copyrights were intended for. Just the other day Jack Hardaway, a professional author, commented on this state of affairs in the context of Sherlock Holmes:

That anyone anywhere views a character introduced 123 years ago as a protected intellectual property is nothing short of idiotic.

You know, it gets just a little moronic after a point. The idea of copyright in the first place was to insure eventual enrichment of the public domain, to expand the body of open culture.

Sweet mother of pearl, is there a bottom feeder of a lawyer somewhere trying to unearth the living progeny of Washington Irving so he can file an IP application for ownership of the characters of Ichabod and the Headless Horseman? There needs to be some kind of legal principle of “prima facie stupid” that says some things are just obviously dumb to a reasonable, prudent, and objective observer; that lawmakers adopt an actual legal definition of “numbnuts”; and that anybody bringing patently asinine intellectual property motions can legally be considered one.

And writers aren’t guiltless in this assault on open-source culture. Ask most authors how long they think their copyrights should last and they’ll tell you … that their copyrights should last for a century or longer. Today’s authors, who by the very nature of their work make widespread use of the public domain, seem to be basically opposed to personally augmenting it. They think the public domain of literature is a fine thing as long as THEY don’t have to contribute to it.

As Hardaway suggests, after a while legalisms become patently absurd, pardon the pun.