If
a 1902 Public Domain Copyright can be
extended by Congress -- Why can't Nathan
Stubblefield 1888-1908 Patent be
extended?
By Scott B.
Stubblefield, Esq.
During
my Q&A session with TVI Magazine,
during the recent February
NATPE convention in Las Vegas, while
promoting my great-grandfather, Nathan B.
Stubblefield's, 100th year celebration for
the world's First ship to shore Wireless
Telephone Broadcast, that took place in
Washington D.C. in 1902, I was asked the
following:
Q
- "What would happen if Broadcasters
and
wireless telephone
manufactures, distributors of the
electromagnetic wave, telephone companies,
publishers and experts in intellectual
property law were caught by surprise by a
high court ruling, that Nathan B.
Stubblefield's 1898 and1908 "wireless
telephone" patents should be treated
equally to copyright extensions?"
A -
My answer was direct and simple. "The
wireless industry would owe the family of
Nathan B. Stubblefield, and his Murray,
Kentucky investors billions of dollars, in
lost revenue."
Q -
"Say the high court announced that it
would review
a 1st Amendment challenge
mounted by a coalition of Internet
entrepreneurs and legal scholars to the
Revised patent laws of 1905, Statute, Sec
4886, an act that should have extended
patents for an additional 100 years."
Again my answer was direct and simple.
A - 'I
would use the internet to research case
law, patents surround "wireless, and
recent news media reports and articles as
models to prove-up the reasons of the
courts rulings -- put on the 100th year
"Wireless Telephone" demonstration -- then
hope for the best."
To
begin with, it needs to be remembered
that public demonstrations,
patents and copyrights are supposed to
protect the free flow of ideas submitted
to the world by the inventor or author,
plus -- any improvements to the invention,
either by himself or others, for a certain
period of time to enable the patent holder
to earn a monetary profit. If it doesn't
-- the period of time for a patent should
be treated equally as copyrights have been
treated by congress, by the U.S. judicial
system, and by the news media.
THE
MODEL FOR THE REVISION OF PATENT
LAWS
The
1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act.
Supporting the appeal,
copyright scholars and Internet
entrepreneurs said the extensions have the
unfortunate, and unintended, effect of
burying works that could be resurrected.
The Gershwin tunes and "The Great Gatsby"
will live on, they said, and the copyright
laws will determine only who profits from
their existence.
To illustrate their point, they cited
in court papers an exception to the rule.
Frank Capra's 1946 film "It's a Wonderful
Life" had a second life when its copyright
was allowed to lapse because of an
oversight. Experts in the matter have
reported that this forgotten movie "lay
gathering dust in a movie studio until the
early 1970s" -- when its copyright
expired.
Once it passed into the public domain,
several public broadcasting stations aired
it during the Christmas season. Within a
few years, the forgotten film became a
classic and a Christmas tradition.
But
Margolis, whose firm represents high
profile copyright holders, called such
arguments disingenuous.
"We're not talking about people who
want to make intellectual property
available to the free world, we're talking
about people who want to go into
business," he said. "The opposition is not
free-speechers. They're people who want to
go into business and make a profit on what
yesterday was someone else's
property."
THE
MODEL ARTICLE #1 FOR THE REVISION
Times Staff Writers HENRY
WEINSTEIN, ANN W. O'NEILL AND MEG JAMES on
February 21, 2002, coauthored the
following, Studios May Have the Most to
Lose article in regards to Copyrights.
Movie studios, record companies,
publishers and experts in intellectual
property law were caught by surprise when
the high court announced Tuesday that it
would review a 1st Amendment challenge
mounted by a coalition of Internet
entrepreneurs and legal scholars to the
1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act. That act extended copyrights for an
additional 20 years.
Billions of dollars and the future
earning power of some of the nation's most
cherished cultural icons are at stake as
the U.S. Supreme Court considers a
constitutional challenge to a 1998
copyright extension law, legal experts
said Wednesday.
The experts agreed that the high
court's decision to consider Eldred vs.
Ashcroft, until Tuesday an obscure appeal,
could lead to the most important copyright
decision in more than 100 years.
"This is a really big deal," said
Stephen Gillers, vice dean of New York
University Law School. "This case is sexy
because it's about money and the arts at
the same time."
"This is it," agreed Dennis S. Karjala,
who teaches copyright and intellectual
property law at Arizona State University
Law School. "It's hard to think of a
bigger copyright case" since the landmark
1879 decision that divided intellectual
property into functional works, which are
patented, and artistic works, which are
copyrighted.
Any ruling by the Supreme Court would
affect early depictions of Mickey Mouse,
first copyrighted in 1928, and film
classics such as "Gone With the Wind" and
"The Wizard of Oz," novels such as "The
Great Gatsby" and "The Sun Also Rises," as
well as early jazz music and compositions
by George and Ira Gershwin.
"I think just about everybody in the
[entertainment] business will be
impacted. Somebody's going to get hurt
here," said Gerry Margolis, of Manatt,
Phelps & Phillips.
David Nimmer, a visiting law professor
at UCLA, said that although many of the
recent copyright cases considered by the
Supreme Court have affected just a narrow
portion of copyright holders, "This case
has the potential to affect every
copyright owner."
Nimmer and Gillers predicted that with
so much at stake, the Supreme Court case
is likely to generate millions in new
legal business.
"Probably billions of dollars ride on
this decision, so millions of dollars will
be spent on lawyers and amicus briefs and
research on the history of copyright going
back to King James," Gillers said.
Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner
said it was "too early to comment"
extensively on possible fallout from any
change in the copyright law. He attempted
to minimize the impact.
"All that has happened is that two
courts upheld Congress' extension of the
copyright law, and we don't consider it
unusual that it is going to the last court
of appeal, the Supreme Court," Eisner
said.
"If it went bad, and I don't think it
will, we're talking about the very early
images [of Mickey Mouse and
others], we're not talking about our
trademarks ... this is not taking away
those values," Eisner said.
But legal and financial analysts
anticipate a huge impact.
"The people who are freaking out are
the studios," said Los Angeles lawyer
Neville Johnson, who has a copyright
infringement case involving a 1920s jazz
song pending in U.S. District Court in Los
Angeles. "It's Mickey Mouse, is why
they're all freaked out."
"In the case of Mickey Mouse, this is a
huge issue," agreed Kevin Lane Keller, a
Dartmouth College marketing professor and
an expert on Disney marketing. "Mickey has
huge symbolic value and he still has a lot
of commercial value.
"These characters and brands have so
much earning potential," Keller said.
"They can be licensed and merchandised in
so many ways. The amounts are staggering.
In a lot of cases, we're talking about
billion-dollar brands."
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and Warner
Bros., which have Hollywood's largest film
libraries, also could feel a huge impact.
The studios had no comment.
Wall Street analysts say it's
difficult, if not impossible, to come up
with an exact dollar value for some of the
studios' most popular characters or
movies. Companies are loath to put a value
on their properties, and usually lump
revenue from those characters or
properties into "intangible assets."
But licensing revenue offers a glimpse
into the value of some of these
properties. For example, Disney has said
that Winnie the Pooh and the Hundred Acre
Woods characters generate a third of all
of their licensing revenue.
In the late 1990s, Pooh generated $2
billion a year for Disney and its
licensees.
Chris McGurk, chief operating officer
at MGM, said, "Copyright is the only thing
that protects us from people taking our
properties, copying them, exploiting them,
doing whatever they want for free."
MGM's James Bond franchise is said to
be worth more than $1 billion for the
Santa Monica studio. It is about a fourth
of the estimated $5-billion value of MGM's
4,100 film library, analysts have
said.
Arizona State's Karjala played a key
role in organizing 60 law professors to
send a letter to Congress in 1998 opposing
the Sonny Bono law, contending that it
"would impose substantial costs on the
United States general public without
supplying any public benefit."
He said Wednesday that the case "is an
issue of tremendous importance. It is one
where we simply can never expect Congress
to follow the constitutional requirements
because there is a built-in bias in the
legislative process for copyright. The
beneficiaries are organized and the
general public is not organized. It's no
one's fault. It's structural. It's a
problem of democracy."
///
MODEL
ARTICLE #2 - - THE COPYRIGHT
REVISION
Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2002,
'Limitless' Copyright Case Faces High
Court Review" -- By DAVID G. SAVAGE, TIMES
STAFF WRITER
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court
announced Tuesday that it will hear a
major challenge to Congress' power to
extend the copyrights of films, books and
songs that first appeared in the 1920s and
1930s--a move that could result in
hundreds of thousands of classic and
forgotten works becoming freely available
via the Internet.
Films such as "Gone with the Wind" and
"The Wizard of Oz," the music of the jazz
era and the compositions of George and Ira
Gershwin, novels such as "The Great
Gatsby" and "The Sun Also
Rises," even Mickey Mouse and Donald
Duck--all would have passed into the
public domain had Congress in 1998 not
extended their legal shield by 20
years.
But this challenge to the copyright
extension is not just about the classic
books, music and movies that are
well-loved today. Opponents of the
extension say that if all the works
published decades ago--and then
forgotten--were in the public domain, many
would have a second chance at popularity,
thanks to Internet archivists who would
make them easily accessible. Under
pressure from Hollywood studios and music
publishers, Congress has extended the
period of copyright protection 11 times
over the last 40 years.
The result, say scholars and
librarians, is "to transform a limited
monopoly into a virtually limitless
one."
The copyright laws are intended to
encourage creativity by allowing authors,
composers and filmmakers to profit from
their works. But under the recent
extension, the legal monopoly continues
for 70 years after an individual author's
or composer's death.
"How can you say you are creating
incentives for authors who are long dead?"
asked Jessica Litman, a law professor at
Wayne State University in Detroit, one of
21 copyright law experts who urged the
Supreme Court to take up the issue.
"Without some check on congressional
power, it is unlikely that any of the
cultural and historical works of the first
half of the 20th century will ever enter
the public domain," added UC Berkeley law
professor Mark Lemley.
In a statement issued by his office,
Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion
Picture Assn. of America, said he had
"absolute confidence that the Supreme
Court will uphold the decision" of a lower
court and "the wisdom of the Congress . .
. in extending the term of copyright
protection by 20 years to maintain parity
with the European Union and other
nations."
In their appeals, the scholars and
Internet entrepreneurs said the copyright
extensions have the unfortunate and
unintended effect of burying works that
could be resurrected.
The Gershwin tunes and "The Great
Gatsby" will live on, they noted, and the
copyright laws will determine only who
profits from their existence.
But the same is not true of most
original works. "Millions of copyrighted
works are created every year; yet after 75
years, few remain in circulation," the
copyright scholars said. In 1930, for
example, 10,027 books were published in
the United States. Only 174 remain in
print today.
"Thousands of old movies sit in shelves
deteriorating because the companies that
hold the copyright make no efforts to
restore them or make them available, while
their copyright status prevents others
from preserving these works," according to
a brief filed on behalf of librarians and
archivists.
To illustrate their point, they cited
Frank Capra's 1946 film "It's a Wonderful
Life," which had a second life when its
copyright was allowed to lapse because of
an oversight. This forgotten movie "lay
gathering dust in a movie studio until the
early 1970s," when its copyright
expired.
Once it passed into the public domain,
several public broadcasting stations aired
it during the Christmas season. Within a
few years, the forgotten film became a
classic and a Christmas tradition.
And now, thanks to digital technology
and the Internet, millions of such works
can be restored and made available to the
public, the librarians and archivists told
the court.
The justices considered the appeals for
several weeks before voting to grant the
case, known as Eldred vs. Ashcroft,
01-618.
Its lead plaintiff, Eric Eldred, runs
an Internet library that posts works in
the public domain. But perhaps more
important, his appeal was filed by
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig,
one of the foremost legal experts on the
Internet and the law.
His appeal challenges the Sonny Bono
Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998,
which added 20 years to most copyrights.
Because of that law, "an extraordinary
range of creative invention will be
blocked from falling into the public
domain at least until 2019--or longer if
Congress extends the copyright term
again," Lessig said.
This, he argues, is
unconstitutional.
First, he says, the Constitution gives
Congress a limited power to protect
copyrights. It says Congress can "promote
the Progress of Science" by granting
"exclusive rights" to authors for "limited
times."
Lessig argues that Congress has
violated this clause by "creating in
practice an unlimited term" for
copyrights.
The nation's Copyright Act in 1790
protected written works for 14 years,
after which authors could seek a renewal
for 14 more years. This 28-year limit
continued until 1909, when Congress
doubled the limit to a possible 56
years.
Since 1962, Congress has repeatedly
extended the maximum term, usually under
pressure from movie producers and the
music industry.
"The real beneficiaries of this are big
media companies, because they own the
copyrights," said Washington lawyer Daniel
H. Bromberg. "The 1998 bill was snidely
referred to as 'The Mickey Mouse Extension
Act' because it was seen as protecting
Disney's characters."
Before Congress, proponents of the
extension argued that creators of works
that remain valuable deserve to profit
from them.
And Tuesday, underscoring the
importance of traditional characters, Walt
Disney Co. executives trotted out Mickey
Mouse, Peter Pan and "Beauty and the
Beast's" Belle at the company's
shareholder meeting in Hartford, Conn.
These Disney characters are
"extraordinary assets," Disney President
Bob Iger said. "They are among the reasons
the Disney brand is so incredibly strong
by any measure."
Under the law being challenged, works
for hire, including films, are protected
for 95 years after their release. Works by
individual authors or composers are
protected for 70 years after their
deaths.
In their appeal, Lessig and his
colleagues also say the extended copyright
monopolies violate the 1st Amendment's
guarantee of freedom of speech. Usually,
the government should not limit free
speech more than necessary, and a 95-year
shield for some works is well more than
necessary, Lessig argues.
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals in
Washington rejected a challenge to the
copyright extension on a 2-1 vote. Its
judges said only Congress could determine
a reasonable time period for a copyright.
Moreover, the appeals court said old films
and books are more likely to survive if
their copyright value is preserved.
"Extending the duration of copyrights
on existing works would, among other
things, give copyright holders an
incentive to preserve older works,
particularly motion pictures in need of
restoration," the judges wrote.
U.S. Solicitor Gen. Theodore B. Olson
said he agreed and urged the court to
reject the challenges to the law. There is
"no 1st Amendment right to exploit the
work that Congress has purported to
protect," Olson said.
The American Library Assn., the
Internet Archive and dozens of legal
experts filed briefs in recent months
urging the high court to rethink that
presumption.
So far, however, the Supreme Court has
heard only from those groups that oppose
the copyright extension. They will file
their legal briefs in several months, and
the case will not be heard before the high
court until the fall.
///
MORE
April-May 2001
Respectfully
Submitted
Josie
Cory
Publisher/Editor
TVI Magazine
TVI
Magazine, tviNews.net, Associated Press,
Reuters, BBC, LA Times, NY Times, VRA's
D-Diaries, Press Releases and SmartSearch
were used in compiling and ascertaining
this news report.
Troy
Cory-Stubblefield's, Smart-Daaf Boys
All-In-One Dictionary, the U.S.
Patent Office, TVI Magazine, and VRA's
D-Diaries were used in compiling this
report
•
106 - Government:
Politics,
Taxes, Security, Shelter, Education,
Telecommunication and the Department of
Defense are directly linked to Arts and
Science's lobbying influences. The
mechanics of lobbying and its link to big
business and telecommunications are
featured in this section, along with
features about Criminal and Civil Justice.
It was TVI Magazine's 1990 issue, that
first published the prediction that
Government will
get smaller, but police agencies will get
bigger. The powers relinquished to Home
Security and Police agencies will make the
Gestapo group look like pikers. Hollywood
is here to stay. Its good for politics and
a good war movie or two!
Today's
Puzzle:
Can you mix Wine, Women, Business and
Song with the FBI, CIA and/or any other
foreign Spy intelligence?
Today's
Puzzle:
Is it true that the a new federal
health program is going to be operated and
financed by the Department of
Defense?
_____________
•
100
- DeskTop
Humor
•
101
- Food
& Fun
•
102
- Internet
•
103
- Shelter
•
104
- Health
•
105
- Religion
•
106
- Government
•
107
- Arts
& Science
•
108
- Money
•
109
- Education
•
110
- Hi
Tech
•
111
- Opinion
•
112
- World
•
113
- They
Said It
•
114
- Obituary
•
115
- Calendar
•
116
- Welcome
•
117
- AboutUs
•
118
- Q&A
•
119
- Blue
Print of the Future
•
120
- Yes
•
121
- Dear
Editor
Respectfully
Submitted
Josie
Cory
Publisher/Editor
TVI Magazine
TVI
Magazine, tviNews.net, Associated Press,
Reuters, BBC, LA Times, NY Times, VRA's
D-Diaries, Press Releases and SmartSearch
were used in compiling and ascertaining
this news report.
LookRadio.com
-
Do
it with movies, slide shows and
music!
-----
Smart90's
24-hour, 365 days-a-year Broadband
S90tv
WebMagic
web page is the simplest way to add the
WebMagic to your existing web pages. It's
an Exciting New Way to Advertise.
-----
Advertise
Now on Smart90.com and utilize S90tv's Web
Magic on your own domain.
Email
your insertion order and advertising copy
or banner requests to the attention of:
Advertising Marketing Director
at
look@smart90.com™.
- -----To
get you started today, you can attach to
your Email, your logo, slides,
transparencies, illustrations, photographs
or other computer graphics. The materials
will be forwarded directly to our art
department.-
- -----
Advertising
material must be received by the 10th of
every month to be included in the
following scheduled print magazine issue.
In regards to our daily tviNews.net
edition, your banner, logo, web movie,
slide show or 60x500 animated banner, that
is to be headlined at the top of our
featured news page, as a linkonad or
smartkudoad,
can be Emailed to us at your convenience.
- -----
Or
better yet, tell us where to go to fetch
the information -- this way it will be
much quicker to get you up and running.
For Ad rates please click on:
TVI
Advertising Rates.
Please
read: "How
Do We Do Business?
We
Preserve The Moment
Returnˆ
To Top
|
