Culture is Free for People with Money
After reading Kristin's post it hit me. Lets take Disney for example, at the time Dinsney was a company with few releases, maybe wasn't so rich but adjusted revenue of "Snow White and Seven Dwarves" was over 600 million dollars this is the smallest number of all sources i've looked this is also earlist available data. Disnay had a few cartoons out already before Mickey, when "borrowing" the image of another character, Steamboat Willie, nobody cared about it. In fact it wasn't important enough to be remembered and because Disney had already reputation on the market it was a lost cause for the original creator in my opinion.
If I would go and try to copyright "That's Hot" for TV before Paris Hilton I would be laughed at. Paris Hilton got the copyright because of her family's reputation and money. However, this is my opinion and the fact that culture is free for people with money is bugging me. Also my opinion is that nothing like that should be copyrighted, language was created to be spoken freely and not a source of income for people.
If I would go and try to copyright "That's Hot" for TV before Paris Hilton I would be laughed at. Paris Hilton got the copyright because of her family's reputation and money. However, this is my opinion and the fact that culture is free for people with money is bugging me. Also my opinion is that nothing like that should be copyrighted, language was created to be spoken freely and not a source of income for people.
posted by Pavel at 1:27 PM
3 Comments:
When we speak of intellectual property, we must realize the differences between intellectual and physical property. When we speak of "stealing" physical property, we assume that somebody has taken another person's physical property which holds a certain value. The owner is now deprived of his property and is left with nothing. However, there is a difference when we speak of "stealing" intellectual property, because the original owner still possesses his original work. Rather than labeling this act as stealing, it is better known as infringement.
In Walt Disney's case, cartoons had just started to begin. It was a new technology at the time, and much like the problem we are faced with today, they did not know what to consider theft and how to prevent because of the new technology. Because Walt Disney was the first case, they got away with it. The laws on intellectual property need to change alongside technology if we don't want things like this to repeat itself.
Either way it doesn't matter. Pavel is correct. If you have money you can do anything that you want because it is hard to turn down an offer when a large load of cash is offered.
This makes you wonder why intellectual property is so debated because if you have money you can break a lot of laws.
This sounds extremely bias but i believe this is the truth because i know people that don't have money as well as people that do and it is obvious to see the advantages of having money just like their was an advantage with Disney.
My comment is regarding Paris' slogan "that's hot". Even though she shelled out money to have it be her thing that she says under legal standards, I still don't understand how that will bring in royalties. If I were to say it on the radio or during a random t.v. interview, could she possibly come after me for not saying "as Paris would say...that's hot"? I'm also not so sure how they go about enforcing this stuff, as far as patenting sayings. How is language owned by some one person? I could understand Kellog's putting a protection for the saying, "that's gggrrrreat", but that would only be prevention for other cereal brands. I think it's ludacrous to take away rights to a three word phrase because some princess thinks it's hers. P.S. I really have nothing against her :)
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