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Chargement... Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internetpar Peter Decherney
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Copyright law is important to every stage of media production and reception. It helps determine filmmakers' artistic decisions, Hollywood's corporate structure, and the varieties of media consumption. The rise of digital media and the internet has only expanded copyright's reach. Everyone from producers and sceenwriters to amateur video makers, file sharers, and internet entrepreneurs has a stake in the history and future of piracy, copy protection, and the public domain. Beginning with Thomas Edison's aggressive copyright disputes and concluding with recent lawsuits against YouTube, Hollywood's Copyright Wars follows the struggle of the film, television, and digital media industries to influence and adapt to copyright law. Many of Hollywood's most valued treasures, from Modern Times (1936) to Star Wars (1977), cannot be fully understood without appreciating their legal controversies. Peter Decherney shows that the history of intellectual property in Hollywood has not always mirrored the evolution of the law. Many landmark decisions have barely changed the industry's behavior, while some quieter policies have had revolutionary effects. His most remarkable contributions uncover Hollywood's reliance on self-regulation. Rather than involve congress, judges, or juries in settling copyright disputes, studio heads and filmmakers have often kept such arguments "in house," turning to talent guilds and other groups for solutions. Whether the issue has been battling piracy in the 1900s, controlling the threat of home video, or managing modern amateur and noncommercial uses of protected content, much of Hollywood's engagement with the law has occurred offstage, in the larger theater of copyright. Decherney's unique history recounts these extralegal solutions and their impact on American media and culture. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Early in the movies’ history, it was unclear whether the performances therein qualified for copyright, either because they weren’t considered sufficiently dramatic or because they were perhaps immoral—as is consistently the case with copyright, sex confounds the law. It was also unclear who was responsible for a recorded performance, assuming that infringed someone else’s right; in one important case, a film company claimed that it wasn’t responsible for infringing the novel Ben-Hur because it had merely filmed a chariot race staged by the Brooklyn Fire Department—apparently the novel sparked a vogue for such recreations; fandom is everywhere!
Later, studios fought with directors over artistic control. When films were first being edited for television broadcast, critics often worried over their “emasculation,” a loaded word indeed. As Decherney points out, the passage of time turns outrages against art into high art; just as directors for years fended off charges that they were mutilating novels and plays in their adaptations, now directors became believers in the inviolability of their own art.
Hollywood’s history with copyright law is full of these ironies, including the studios’ fear of the VCR that ultimately brought them great riches (Decherney notes that Disney, one of the great opponents, was a niche studio until the profits enabled by videotape sales gave it the capital to fund its next great wave of films).
More recently, Decherney argues, the 1970s avant-garde developed in the context of various assumptions about what could legitimately be done, especially with music. Even when these assumptions didn’t exactly follow the law, they shaped behavior. “Underground” works were ignored by copyright owners, but still used music cautiously, and their makers licensed rights in order to show them at international festivals or on TV. Kenneth Anger’s “avant-garde classic Scorpio Rising (1964) … freely used old film clips, advertisements, and cartoons. Some viewers were shocked by the sexual situations depicted in the film. Many filmmakers were more surprised by Anger’s flagrant use of popular music to create counterpoint and commentary. Anger’s 30-minute film used a ‘wall-to-wall’ string of poular hits ….” What they didn’t know was that Anger had actually cleared the rights for the songs (though apparently for nothing else); it more than doubled his budget and cost more than the total budget of most avant-garde films. Martin Scorcese watched and was shocked—his NYU professors had always told him not to use music in a student film. He said: “That gave me the idea to use whatever music I really needed.” While the gatekeepers enforced the rules on music, setting the fair use options at zero, Scorcese decided to use unlicensed music in his own student films, which got him ready to make breakthrough uses of music, this time licensed, in his later feature films. Among the complicated lessons here is that “misinformation can be as powerful as accurate information.”
Decherney also tells the story of the unusual case in which experimental video was suppressed by copyright owners: Todd Haynes’s 1987 Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, blocked not by Mattel but by Richard Carpenter. Haynes decided to proceed without licensing the music—based in part on his beliefs about Scorpio Rising--but was ultimately forced to stop allowing it to be shown. Of course, this all made Superstar more attractive as a bootleg, and it’s still pretty easy to find. Haynes’s story created its own myths about copyright and trademark overreaching among filmmakers, even though Decherney didn’t find any other instances of such legal threats until the rise of online video sites like YouTube. Hollywood in general hasn’t been very aggressive about pursuing self-proclaimed video artists, in part, Decherney suggests, because the law of fair use is “underdeveloped and highly unpredictable” in this area, as well as because the economic harm is realistically nonexistent and the public relations risks real.
YouTube was a disruptive technology not because it created a video-sharing culture; plenty of people were primed to share their videos already. Instead, Decherney suggests, YouTube brought a number of different videomaking cultures—and their expectations around copyright and fair use—into contact and occasional conflict, and made them all more visible to each other and to copyright owners. “The fans, avant-garde artists, home video makers, and other fair use communities had spent decades learning when they should worry about attracting the attention of copyright holders…. They all became subject to increased surveillance, and their cultures of fair use were homogenized as large media companies sought one-size-fits-all solutions to employing the DMCA to control copyright infringement.” (And the OTW gets a shout-out for its advocacy, yay!) ( )