The Shawshank Residuals
wsj.com
wsj.com
When I first saw this movie, in theaters, in 1995 I found it highly enjoyable, with a narrative very well built, but certainly not a classic. It is very conventional and I didn't see anything revealing or innovative about it.
Now I understand that its virtues are exactly its conventionalism. Its message is the same belief that drags people to churches and self help books: "preserve and you will prevail". The storytelling is perfect: a slow and steady stream of setbacks until a liberating end. It has a Morgan Freeman voice over, what can be more reassuring than this? That voice is so reliable that the man played the role God more than one time and Nelson Mandela.
Whenever you're unsure, confused and insecure about what you think or believe "Shawshank Redemption" is the most reassuring and comforting of all movies. Not even Frank Capra could do better.
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/books/english/e_books
> A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.
[snip]
> In each of these books the author has been able to identify himself with his imagined characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of abandonment that cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve.
To be fair, as a modern westerner, it was around the time of Shawshank that I began to be turned off the movie genre, or at least - the mainstream genre. I actually don't think I've paid for a movie since that era of movie making. Shawshank Redemption may well be the very last movie I ever saw in a theatre, willingly.
I share this ability with the residents of 42 states who haven't been convicted of felonies or domestic misdemeanors. Last time I checked that was > 2/3rd of the population, and with California (and Hawaii) currently losing a court case this could well become 44 states and ~3/4ths of the population. I trust I needn't mention our right to own serious rifles "of military utility" as well...
As for your latter point, you're assuming two things: someone wanting revenge on the police/government for something unforgivable is going to give a damn about that, and that if things got nasty, the citizens would play by the "rules of war" of the police. Not to mention numbers, we would utterly swamp them if it came down to something like that. Look at how batshit insane California police got when one crazy started hunting them (Christopher Dorner).
If you ponder fictional police states such as 1984, in that situation it doesn't really matter if the citizens have firearms as they're thoroughly brainwashed that they would never use them. And, just like our world, if they did they would be brutally suppressed.
My opinion is that the people of the United States could not and would not stand up effectively to the National Guard, police and military if it came down to such a thing.
That's ... incredible.
Still an excellent story.
This is something to bear in mind when advocating shorter copyright terms or arguing that the market will establish the 'right' price for some piece of IP. Studios cross-subsidize pictures all the time as a matter of fiscal necessity. While Shawshank has proved to be a very reliable money-spinner and secondary & tertiary market rentals thus subsidize lesser films, in turn it is because of the residual income from other films that films such as Shawshank get made and have theatrical releases. Packaging films in the distribution cycle is a risk mitigation strategy: if every film had to be the subject of an individual deal then fewer and more (aesthestically) conservative films would get made, because neither producers' expectations nor release audiences are good guides to the long-term performance of a film. The same is true in many fields of the arts. Insistence on equating the commercial of cultural products with artistic merit promotes the lowest common denominator of whatever performs best in the initial release window, and 'whatever performs best' is typically a function of the marketing budget, which these days makes up about 50% of a film's headline cost.
Even if it did exist for the purpose of generating profit versus promoting culture and progress, I feel like many (except, of course, said megacorporation) can agree that its current incarnation is for a ludicrously, damagingly long amount of time.
In either case I'm not weeping for Hollywood; it's not like they've never made anything but a staggering profit regardless of copyright era, and if your argument is true then I'd rather have a handful fewer movies made than bow to the eternal stranglehold on all culture the current copyright regime entails.
In either case I'm not weeping for Hollywood; it's not like they've never made anything but a staggering profit regardless of copyright era
Hollywood isn't a monolith. It's a disparate collection of people, many of whom slave away at their craft for years without ever making it big or seeing one of their projects pay off. You might as well say that you don't give a fig about net neutrality or some other topic at the intersection of computers and law because 'the tech industry has never made anything but a staggering profit'. Sure, if you cast your net broad enough, any long-established industry has been very successful, by definition.
That's a false dichotomy. Promoting culture and progress is the end, but the means is creating a property right the value of which is, like every property right, the possibility of generating a profit.
For others, including prominent art critics (of the European persuassion at least), "culture and progress" can mostly be harmed by profits.
As well as working in film, I also enjoy opera, and I'm struck by how the San Francisco Opera does Tosca almost every damn season, presumably because someone on the board or high up on the donor list really loves it. Yeah, it's a great opera, but there are hundreds of operas and even a moderately large and well-financed company like the SF Opera only does about 12 productions in a year. They aim for a mix of reliable favorites and interesting new works/productions, but the near-permanent presence of Tosca on their calendar is a reminder of how badly patronage can skew things. By rights, it ought to be staged every 5-6 years; having it on stage almost every year means proportionally fewer productions of other great Verdi operas such as La Traviata.
I still haven't heard a decent argument for keeping the unpopular stuff protected as long as it currently is.
If someone spends decades building a business, such as a drycleaning chain, they're able to pass that on to future generations. In fact, the ability to pass a business on is a major motivation for a lot of people to build that business in the first place.
So why shouldn't Rowling be able to pass Harry Potter on to her kids? Why should her business be treated differently?
I don't completely agree with this argument. It doesn't address rights sold to corporations, for example. And personally I'd like to see copyright terms at about half of what they are now.
But this particular argument does have some merit, and I'm not completely against it, either.
Culture--the fabric of our past, woven through creative work like art and literature--isn't the same. Some culture exists to make money, but much doesn't. We all absorb it almost without realizing it or intending to. A child might inherit a dry-cleaner and build a career running and improving it, or likewise failing and causing the inheritance to go bust. But the child of JK Rowling had absolutely no practical bearing on the creation of Harry Potter, and the books Rowling already wrote are unalterable. Thus children who inherit intellectual "property" wind up as pure rent-seekers on our culture, at best idle managers/stewards of someone else's hard work.
(Now you might say that a child might inherit an apartment building, thus making them rent-seekers in the practical sense--and that's true, literally. But an apartment building has taxes, upkeep, maintenance, etc. involved--it requires work to maintain. But opening a mailbox to collect the royalty check on your grandparent's grandparent's novel is rent-seeking in the philosophical sense.)
Furthermore, new culture is invariably built upon old culture. All the famous old Disney films that Disney is trying so hard to keep out of the public domain were themselves based on public-domain work. Try using a character from a Disney film in your work and see how quickly their lawyers find you. Try copying a dry-cleaner wholesale and you're just one more business on the block.
In short, comparing an inherited business to an inherited intangible cultural work isn't a fair comparison. It might seem fair because nowadays we (tragically!) use the word "property" to describe what is actually a "temporary government-sanctioned monopoly"--but ideas aren't property, and business isn't culture.
Because her kids could do absolutely nothing and live off of royalty checks or whatever her media empire generates and still be very very rich. That's dishonest in a lot of people's minds, right and left, and people tend to want to fix that problem.
(Just because I mentioned that mindset tells you absolutely nothing about whether I hold it.)
A more sophisticated take on that argument is, if someone can set up their entire genetic lineage from one series of novels, where's their descendants' incentive to create more? Are we really that sure that nobody descended from Rowling would have been a creator but for this windfall?
Another, somewhat related argument, is the idea that copyright stakes out too much territory, which would otherwise have been used by legal fanfic, which could set up other families, and why should we disallow that? I know Rowling is very permissive about fanfic, but why should someone else's business be up to her?
Sure, that could happen. But it happens all the time with drycleaners and steel mills and car dealerships and whatever else too.
It takes a huge amount of work, not just creative, but business work, to get build something that lasts like that.
What about brands? What about people who build a large brand in retail or fast food or cars or whatever? They can leave the fruits of their brand building to their children. Why is the Harry Potter brand the odd man out?
And there's certainly a lot of work to be done keeping the business going. Someone is running the James Bond empire, the Disney empire, the Tolkien empire. They don't run themselves. Actual work is involved.
Anyway, like I said, I don't totally buy the argument, but it's not completely invalid either.
Because it can keep ticking along without producing a single new thing. Coca-Cola, to remain worth anything, must at least keep producing new bottles of soda.
> And there's certainly a lot of work to be done keeping the business going. Someone is running the James Bond empire, the Disney empire, the Tolkien empire. They don't run themselves. Actual work is involved.
Actual work which nobody but the heirs will see the benefits of, assuming what I have assumed.
Now, it's possible I'm completely out to sea on this, and that if nobody keeps making new works in the Harry Potter universe the brand and franchise will die. But the mere fact copyright law makes such self-sustaining non-productive empires possible is irksome.
I'm not at all sure that copyright should extend beyond the life of the author but I think you should acknowledge that while all the stuff above serves a marketing function it also provides utility to hardcore fans of the original works.
Actual work which nobody but the heirs will see the benefits of, assuming what I have assumed.
Viewers and consumers get a benefit from the careful transfer of original works to new media and the production of new ancillary media. Transfer of existing work to a new medium is not as simple as 'copy originals_star_wars_scan TO 4k_project_template upres'. Although it makes up a tiny part of the consumer cost, format transfers generally require a huge amount of work by skilled professionals, the cost of which can run into the millions. On a film like Star Wars it's a vanishingly small amount of the revenue a new release format can generate, but indirectly that subsidizes (through technological debt) the cost to do similar work for much less popular films, eg the very high quality reissues of substantially less popular films via brands like the Criterion Collection, which maintains very high technical standards for art films with a relatively small audience.
Because we grant copyright in order to encourage further production of creative works. Rowling's kids are not likely to produce further works no matter how long their copyright is. There is no benefit to society for granting copyright much beyond the life of the creative individual.
In fact, the problem is precisely the opposite. Because we keep giving longer copyright terms, properties like Mickey Mouse and Sonic the Hedgehog get dull, uninspired treatments when new people could take those properties and make something cool.
All creative output is derived from our shared culture, a shared resource. One requiring renewal. Copyright holders should only be granted their rights selectively and for limited times. Returning the shared resources contained within their works to the Public Domain.
Mr. Darabont said he took a night to think about it. "But it was never an option," he said. "Most of it boils down to, 'Why are we here?' That was a passion I was very determined to pursue and not just sell to the highest bidder."
"A partial visual history of sugru" http://sugru.com/us/story
But maybe that's because I'm Irish.