Copyright Law Empowers the Woke Left: Time for Reform
Liberals quite literally own the culture. Time to take it back.
The Woke Left controls American culture at the point of a gun.
Copyright law is the source of this power. Through the ownership of the production and duplication of music, films, and books, a handful of wealthy corporations have effectively gained control over the tastes and habits of the American people.
These copyright holders, these engines of American culture, are overwhelmingly liberal. Their power over our common artistic life grants these titans an unholy and illegitimate level of control over our national life. Conservatives should fight to end this stranglehold.
Take Walt Disney Company as an example. Disney has a market cap of $203 billion—virtually all of which is a result of Disney’s copyrights. Disney is valuable as a company because it has a monopoly on the reproduction of popular stories and intellectual properties. In 2012, for instance, Disney paid $4 billion for the rights to Star Wars. That monopoly on the profits from the Star Wars universe—with its attendant comics, novels, toys, movies, TV shows, and backlist—is worth a lot of money and cultural influence.
That translates to political power. If Disney wants to produce Star Wars movies with purple-haired girlbosses, homosexual characters, and ham-handed racial diversity, those cultural products are going to be seen by millions because they are part of the Star Wars universe, a major part of our cultural life. Disney has the money and the monopoly, and therefore the platform to make sure that political goals important to its leadership, such as the promotion of homosexuality and feminism, are seen by millions.
Without copyright protections, Star Wars would go into the public domain. The original films could be copied and sold by anyone and a new author or company could use the Star Wars trademarks in order to create entirely new works of art. Disney’s gay girlboss version of Star Wars would simply be one of dozens, or even hundreds, of versions that could be produced at will.
Copyright is the sole source of the multi-billion dollar value of the Star Wars universe and of every other cultural product that Disney currently owns. Take away copyright protections on Mickey Mouse, the Pixar films, and the Marvel series and Disney would not have nearly the power and wealth it has now. Instead of grifting off of decades old successes, Disney would need to constantly produce new and popular content for its audience.
Under today’s copyright law, works remain under copyright, in most cases, for 70 years after the artist’s death. This state of affairs is ridiculous. For instance, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series will not go into the public domain until the early 2040s, since Tolkien died in 1973. The more recent movies and TV shows, however, will remain under legal protection until well after 2100 under current law. That isn’t all. Virtually all of the titles and characters in Tolkien’s world are also trademarked. Trademarks can be renewed at ten-year intervals forever under federal law as long as certain conditions are met.
Though Tolkien is long dead, massive corporations, like Amazon and HarperCollins, continue to profit off of his creative work and the value it created. Their monopolistic control of that world grants them the ability to milk his talent even decades after his death.
That value should not be understated. For the Big 5 American book publishers—who collectively publish more than 90% of the bestselling books in America in a given year—ownership of legal rights to their older books or “backlists” is big business. In the fourth quarter of 2023, HarperCollins made 60% of its profit through the sale of books on its backlist.
At the time of the American Founding, under America’s first copyright law, the term of a copyright lasted just 14 years. If we went back to that original framework, every book, movie, tv show, and song published before 2010 would enter the public domain.
This return to copyright as originally understood—as a temporary monopoly to incentivize the creation of new culturally and scientifically valuable work by allowing artists a way to monetize their labor—would strike a major blow at the leftwing corporations that now own our culture. A more limited copyright would also help new artists. By restricting the long-term monetization of cultural properties, publishers would need to fund and publish more new artists in order to turn a profit.
Competition for new talent would make our cultural life more dynamic and introduce much needed competition into our artistic and entertainment industries. Restricting copyright would cripple corporate gatekeepers to the benefit of small and up and coming artists and production companies. It would also make older books and films much cheaper. Due to digitization, the actual cost of transmitting public domain books and movies would drop to nearly zero. Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Paramount+, and Disney+ would not be able to charge high monthly fees to show older content that would now be available basically for free.
A 14-year limit on copyright is still more than enough time for an artist to profit off of their work. Hit films, books, and TV shows make plenty of money in their first runs. Preventing long-term monetization over decades doesn’t stop artists from making lots of money with a new piece of art but it does put an end to grifting by production companies and estates who capitalize off of popular works of art for decades.
Culture is downstream of politics. The laws are the most powerful teachers in our regime. The ability to punish unauthorized duplication of artistic works gives the holders of those rights an unparalleled power to shape our culture. Take that power away and America would be a much better country.
Conservatives who oppose Hollywood’s degeneracy and the non-stop leftist agitation in the music and entertainment industries should work to take away the government-granted monopolies that make all this possible.
Copyright reform is one of the most important steps we can take to a better, more healthy, American cultural and political life.
The first book I got published through a small traditional publishing house came out in 2008. The second came out in 2009, and my third in 2010. All three of those works, under the original definition of copyright would be under public domain.
And that would be fine by me. I've continued to write and produce genre fiction over the years, expanding upon worldbuilding fantasy I established back in those first three books and delving more and more into horror.
If those three works had been my only works, I might feel differently, sure. But as I create more, I'm always trying to learn and improve; those earlier works becoming public domain wouldn't hurt me any, as I'm a small-timer.
I'm rambling, sorry.
I wrote about copyright when I was a law student.
Two observations.
First, fourteen years is probably too short. I'd argue for something more like the longer of twenty-one years or the life of the author. That's long enough to preserve most of the monetary incentives that copyright is supposed to provide, but it really does limit them to the creators themselves. Quasi-immortal publishing empires and literary estates would be a thing of the past.
But second, and more importantly, copyright isn't just about financial incentives. It's also about preserving the integrity of the relationship between creator and audience. For fictional works, this is arguably not that big of a deal. But for non-fiction works (and especially for things like software) it's actually enormously important. Lack of meaningful copyright protection is why Wikipedia is an inherently unreliable (and, indeed, manipulable) source of information. There's no easy, robust way of telling who has written what, and whether the material you're reading is, in fact, what any given author actually wrote.
Concrete example: No small part of the trouble Galileo had convincing people about the validity of his lunar observations because Siderius Nuncius was so widely--and badly!--pirated. The text was, for the most part, more-or-less accurate. But the most critical part was his engravings of his observations of the moon, which unscrupulous/unskilled pirate printers did not accurately reproduce (which was, it must be said, a very difficult technical challenge in the sixteenth century). The resulting images (sometimes upside-down and/or backwards!) were obviously different from the actual moon. The resulting this discrepancy cast doubt on the accuracy of the entire book.
Unfortunately, it was only possible to tell a genuine copy from a pirated one if one possessed a verifiably genuine copy to begin with. Given the basic lack of any copyright enforcement regime at the time, this meant having one delivered personally be Galileo himself.
These days, reproducing text and images is trivially easy. If anything, that makes the problem worse. Think of copyright laws as legally binding version control. In the absence of such, there's really no way to determine basic authorship information, let alone accuracy and authenticity, about any written work.