Missouri Classical Music News

WN: In the book, you talk about copyright law being out of balance. Can you explain that?

Boyle:There are several ways this has happened. For one thing, copyright now lasts longer than it ever has before, so anyone who's telling the history of American culture after 1923 is using stuff that's copyrighted. That's a long time ago. A lot of people who were working in the past were working under certain rules, knowing that work would soon be in the public domain. Well, we're unfortunately unique as a generation completely cut off from the past 80 years because of the continual extension of copyright terms.

The second thing is that there are a lot of claims under copyright that really have nothing to do with copyright law. This is what Larry Lessig calls the "permissions culture," where people ask permission for the use of tiny fragments that end up in the background of their films or music out of fear or under threat of lawsuit.

And the third thing is the technology. In the '50s, it was quite hard to violate copyright. You needed a printing press or a movie studio. Now all of us make copies of things all the time.

A fourth thing that cuts the other way is the fear-and-loathing syndrome. There's a whole generation of filmmakers and digital creators whose only experience of copyright is as a hassle, as an obstruction, as a cease-and-desist letter preventing them from making or distributing their work. They see copyright as a pointless labyrinth they have to make their way through to make their art.