Failure to communicate

At Noshi Sushi tonight:

"The movement isn't about abolishing copyright. The goal is to achieve more sensible copyright laws, so the public domain doesn't disappear."

"But why do we need a public domain? Artists should make their own damn work."

"Sure they should. But do you realize that if the copyright laws that existed at the beginning of the century were the law now, you would be able to use a Bob Dylan song in your work without hiring lawyers and paying a fortune?"

"But why should I be able to do that? Why should I be able to steal his work instead of making my own?"

"Let me give you another example. I want to make a movie about Oliver Stone's JFK. I want to use parts of that film to show how he used the power of cinema to tell outrageous lies. I know how he did it, and I know that they are lies. I want to prove that by using parts of the film, slowing it down, providing commentary, introducing the real facts, showing how Joe Pesci's performance, for example, achieves this huge emotional pitch right as the movie is telling you its biggest lie. I have a serious commentary I want to make about an important piece of our culture and history. But Warner Bros. would never let me do it. I'll never be able to do it. Nobody will. That political statement is wrapped up forever, controlled by a corporation that wants perpetual copyright."

"So write a book about it. Nobody can stop you from doing that."

"There is no way I can do this effectively without using the film. I want to directly quote long passages from the film, analyze the hell out of them, put this on a DVD and sell it far and wide. I want access to the same conversation channels that Oliver Stone had--the commercial movie marketplace. I want to answer his political movie. And, as an average citizen without a team of lawyers to fight Warner Bros. and Oliver Stone and the cast and the composer and SAG and God knows who else, I can't."

"I don't see why you should be able to use his work. If everything falls into the public domain, I think that would just be an excuse for corporations to snatch up the work of independent artists and sell it. They'd just steal it. Do you really want someone to take Bat Boy and make 'The Bat Child' out of it and give you nothing?"

"In thirty years, sure. I would have had thirty years to get something out of it. Plus, if that were the law, I'd have access right now to all that great work done up to 1973. I don't know what I'd do with it, but that's only because it has never made sense even to think about it."

"But what if you're poor and homeless in thirty years, and someone else is getting rich off Bat Boy? That isn't fair. And you know corporations would do that. They're always ripping off artists and this would just give them one more opportunity."

"If I haven't managed to create something worthwhile for 30 years, I don't know if I deserve creative welfare. Thirty years is long enough to exploit a work."

"I just think that artists should create their own original work and not just copy someone else's."

Damn. I HAVE to get better at this. This was a conversation with someone who should be a natural ally--she's liberal as hell, a former radical, a great writer, anti-corporate, listens almost exclusively to indie bands, doesn't own a television. But she truly believes that present copyright laws favor artists.

There is no way this movement is going to succeed if it only attracts academics, lawyers and Netheads. But I can't figure out a way to explain this issue in a conversation like the above. I ended up defaulting to, "I'm gonna give you a copy of The Future of Ideas."

What a loser. I have to get better at this.