If true, this story is outragous (and frightening): in Billings, Montana, the DEA used the anti-drug RAVE act to prevent a benefit for pro-drug-legalization groups.

So the RAVE Act is used, not to oppose drug use, but to oppose the free speech of folks who disagree with anti-drug laws.
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Kudos to the Texas anti-abortion group which sued for their right to set up fifteen-foot photos of dead fetuses. Not only are they protecting the general free speech rights of students, their fixation on grossing people out also hurts the public image of the entire pro-life movement. It’s a win-win situation.

The pro-life group says that it was their political views which were being censored, but I bet that if PETA had set up fifteen-foot high gore photos of slaughterhouses in the same plaza, they would have gotten the same reaction. The university claimed that their actions weren’t censorship, because they merely wanted demonstrators confined to “free speech zones.” I figure anything that’s bad for free speech “zones” (shouldn’t the entire country be such a zone?) is good.

Link via the Volokh Conspiracy.

The vast majority of films are never seen, never watched. If they still exist at all, they sit in private repositories and rot. Why? Because there’s no profit in preserving these films.

But what happens if film buffs and historians try to preserve those films, restore the prints, and make them available to the public? Well, then, the film buffs and historians risk getting sued - there’s plenty of profit in suing people, after all.

It’s yet another perverse incentive created by the American copyright system. From a letter to Congress written by supporters of the Eric Eldred Act:

The Eric Eldred Act is a way of allowing “abandoned works” to be released to the public domain. It would require copyright holders to pay a low registration fee (say, one dollar) after fifty years to maintain their ownership of the copyright. Otherwise, the work becomes public domain, and the scholars, archivists and preservationists can have at it. It’s a simple, straightforward, and cheap way of addressing a real problem.

(Frankly, I’d go a lot further to reform copyright than just the Eric Eldred Act - but the EEA is a good, moderate start.)

Found via Nathan Newman.

Weather head reports on a Pennsylvania law I hadn’t heard about. The law purports to be aimed at child porn websites - but the way it’s applied is horrifying.

You see, rather than aiming at child porn producers, the law targets internet service providers like AOL and Earthlink.

It gets worse. There’s no way for internet providers to block access to just one URL, like www.filth.com. In order to comply with a government request to block access to filth.com, the ISP has to block access to filth.com’s entire IP address, which may include dozens or hundreds of websites that have nothing to do with filth.com, but just happen to pay the same company to host their webpage. Take my website, for instance; amptoons is hosted by jennworks.com, which in turn is hosted by successfulhosting.com. Successfulhosting hosts thousands of other websites; I have no idea what their websites are, or what their content is. But if Pennsylvania’s attorney general decides he doesn’t like just one of those websites, then all successfulhosting sites - including this one - will become unavailable in Pennsylvania.

As Weather head says: “Thus, for every (alleged) evil site that’s blocked, hundreds of others may be blocked as well, and the people affected by this have no recourse (they can’t even find out that they’ve been blocked); nor do any Net-surfers have a clue that the sites aren’t just out of order.”

Weather head goes on to make an interesting general argument about the Intenet; he thinks the internet is more susceptible to censorship than traditional media:

It’s an interesting point. On the other hand, old media is very susceptible to the informal censorship of wealth; it’s all very well to say that a newspaper can be read without hardware, but a newspaper can’t be printed and distributed without hardware. And even if you do print it, the distribution networks are virtually impossible to break into. And expensive as a printing press is, it’s nothing compared to how much money it takes to break into radio or TV broadcasting.

At least the hardware required to publish on the internet is affordable (relatively speaking).

I recommend reading Weather Head’s entire post - it’s interesting stuff.

This was odd… this columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle emailed me. He was writing a column on the dangers of paperless voting machines, and he wanted to include a cartoon of mine (which he had seen on another website) as an illustration. But he couldn’t offer any money.

Well, I saw it, and mentally kinda blew it off. I mean, my fees are on a sliding scale starting at five freakin’ dollars, and the Chronicle is a major newspaper. I don’t buy for a moment that they can’t afford to pay me a measly five bucks.

But then, two days later, I thought again. Hey, it’s no skin off my karma if the Chronicle screws over freelancers, and it has a much bigger circulation than most places that print my cartoons. What’s the harm of letting more people see my work? So I email the dude and let him know that if it’s not too late, he can use my cartoon.

Here’s the email he sent back (I’ve changed the names):

Thanks, Barry. When I didn’t hear from you, I called Joan Doe, who put me in touch with Bob Smith, who gave us his permission, as long as we credited B. Deutsch of Amptoons.com. He said he could represent you in that respect. On that basis I went ahead and submitted the bitmap I grabbed off Joan’s site, and the credit line. Barring some last-minute change I’m not aware of, it has probably been printed already and should appear in Monday’s Chronicle.

What the fuck?

I had never given Bob permission to represent me in any respect.

Now, Bob seems like a nice person; he’s got good politics, he likes my cartoons. Probably, in his mind, he was doing me a favor. And in a way, he did me a favor: in the end, I did decide to give the cheap-ass Chronicle permission, but it would have been too late had Bob not intervened.

But, nonetheless -

What the fuck?

What the hell is wrong with some people?

Probably I should email “Bob” just to remind him that he doesn’t have the right to speak for me, but I’m still too amazed at his chuzpah to know what to say.

Sam Heldman says he favored the Supreme Court’s decision in Eldred because the movie Shrek’s “soundtrack included John Cale’s version of Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah”:

I think it’s great and even important that Leonard Cohen get a lot of money for writing such a song, whether it’s used in a movie 15 or 50 or even somewhat more years after he wrote it.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Sam Heldman, but I think he’s wrong on this one. I think the more important issue is: does Leonard Cohen get to choose whether his song will be used in Shrek (or to sell cars, or whatever) or not?

Probably Cohen does get to choose, because he’s one of the lucky successful ones. But tens of thousands of musicians and (to move to a subject near and dear to my heart) cartoonists don’t get to choose, because early in their careers, when their negotiating positions were weak, they sold those rights to major corporations. In fact, it’s the worse of all worlds - they don’t get to choose, they don’t get money for it, and they don’t even get to record their own songs or use their own characters in new work without the copyright owner’s permission. And thanks to the ridiculously extended copyright laws, they can count on dying of old age before they ever get the right to use their creations again.

The Sonny Bono Copyright Act wasn’t about making sure Leonard Cohen gets a fair cut of Shrek; it’s about making sure Michael Eisner, a non-artist who didn’t create Mickey, didn’t draw Mickey, and has never written a Mickey cartoon in his life, continues to get his unfair, unearned share of Mickey. As I wrote about Superman’s creators, back in August:

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster might have been better off had Superman never been copyrighted - at least they would have had the right to continue making Superman comics and selling Superman drawings into old age. (As it is, they ended up penniless, until bad publicity convinced Superman’s owner to give them pensions). The in-practice effect of copyright - and of the overwhelming imbalance of power between a young creator and a huge publisher - is protection of the publisher’s interests, not the creator’s.

It’s great that Cohen gets money for Shrek - but there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and I think what we lose by giving Cohen a never-ending copyright is more important than what we gain. For musicians less successful than Cohen, the result of copyright can easily mean keeping their life works out of print and out of circulation, making them less money than they could have made otherwise (decades-old work that might make enough money for an individual musician to keep in print and sell on a personal website, might not make enough money for a major label to bother keeping in print).

In short, it’s not at all clear, as Sam implies, that artists are - when all is accounted for - the overall beneficiaries of ridiculously extended copyright laws. Almost every artist I know who has an opinion disagreed with the Court in Eldred; either all the artists I know are self-destructive (a real possibility), or they can recognize that the current laws aren’t in their self-interest.

Update: Sam replies here, and makes a very good case that my objections could be fairly addressed without shortening copyright terms.

Below Brad Delong’s blog entry about Larry Lessig, if you scroll past the speech, there are reader comments. Here’s one from Jim Glass that, for obvious reasons, caught my interest:

Say that without copyright you came up with a great, clever cartoon and put it on your web site. What would prevent the scouts from Disney or Fox from just taking it as their own, putting $1 million behind it, making $100 million, and saying screw you. Would you go on to make another cartoon then?

Jim’s comment is a red herring, since Lessig doesn’t propose eliminating copyright altogether. But it does illustrate a common misconception: that the value of an piece of art is the idea, rather than the artist’s development of the idea. (When I ran a site for aspiring cartoonists like myself, I’d get emails from comic strip creators who were scared to submit their idea to cartoon syndicates, "because what if they steal it?" Those cartoonists had the same misconception.)

Consider Calvin and Hobbes - certainly one of the most valuable cartoons of the last twenty years (how many millions of dollars did Bill Watterson turn down by refusing to license merchandise?). Is the value of Calvin in the idea? No, because frankly, the idea - "a boy and his imaginary pal" - is banal. Variants on that idea have been done dozens of times, sometimes well, sometimes not.

The value of the work is that Bill Watterson, Calivn’s creator, is a fucking cartoon genius. It’s what Watterson did with the idea that has value - which is why the syndicate, which was drooling over the idea of Calvin and Hobbes merchandise, did not fire Watterson and hire a more cooperative cartoonist. In the end they gave Calvin and Hobbes, which was their legal property, to Watterson, rather than lose Watterson’s services on the strip.

Why on earth would any business give away something so valuable?

Because they knew - and it’s unusual for a corporation to be this perceptive, frankly - that the idea for Calvin and Hobbes wasn’t as valuable as it seemed. The real value of Calvin was Bill Watterson’s talent. If they had let Watterson go, they could have found a hack to keep the strip going - but it would quickly have become just another comic strip, a waste of space indistinguishable from Dennis the Menace or Marmaduke.

Of course, there are exceptions - sometimes it really is the idea that’s valuable. Superman is the classic example - an billion-dollar idea from cartoonists who did not have world-shaking talent, but who had the right talent for the right idea at the right time.

But Superman brings up another important point (one that is made by Zitka on Brad Delong’s page). Copyright laws do not protect creators of million-dollar ideas. They protect copyright owners.

Copyright certainly didn’t protect Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman.

In the half-century between the creation of Superman and the creation of Calvin and Hobbes, very little changed for cartoonists. The ownership of Superman was signed away for the same reason the ownership of Calvin was signed away decades later: the cartoonists were young, hungry, unpublished and desperate to do comics. And if unknown cartoonists won’t publish the bosses’ way - which means signing away all rights - they won’t get published.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster might have been better off had Superman never been copyrighted - at least they would have had the right to continue making Superman comics and selling Superman drawings into old age. (As it is, they ended up penniless, until bad publicity convinced Superman’s owner to give them pensions). The in-practice effect of copyright - and of the overwhelming imbalance of power between a young creator and a huge publisher - is protection of the publisher’s interests, not the creator’s.

Here’s something the brilliant Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim said, in a speech to a roomful of cartoonists, about dealing with publishers:

The myth of course, is that if they violate the terms of the contract you can sue them. It is a myth because it takes a lot of money to sue an individual successfully and a ton of money to sue a company successfully and that brings me to the second hard truth about companies. No company is ever going to pay you enough money to sue them successfully. They might pay you enough to retain the services of a competent lawyer for a few weeks or a few months or a year or two, but they know you will eventually run out of money and when you do you are going to have to settle out of court. Your settlement might cover your legal expenses but this is not likely.

A lot of people in this room are currently working on material for which they have not received a contract. A lot have completed work for which they have not received a contract. There are even people in this room who have had work published for which they have not received a contract. Companies do this to limit any possibility of negotiation. By the time you get the contract, you have already done so much work and need money so badly that you will sign it whatever you might think of the terms.

For the vast majority of working cartoonists - and, I suspect, working musicians as well (if you haven’t done so already, read this article by Janis Ian, and this one (pdf link) too) - that is the reality. Copyright law, in its current incarnation, is not about protecting my interests. Those who say that copyright must not be changed, because cartoonists like me need the protection… well, at best, they’re not familiar with the facts on the ground.