Re: [dvd-discuss]Long Term Copyright just invites lawsuits

[johnzu(at)ia.nsc.com]

>http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Movies/02/03/film.welles.reut/index.html
>
>HOLLYWOOD, California (Variety) -- Beatrice Welles, the daughter of
> Orson Welles, has filed a lawsuit claiming she is the owner of the rights
> to film classic "Citizen Kane." 

>Ironically this may be another posterchild for shortening copyright...after 60 
>yrs even the original contracts may be dust.

I'm not so sure.  In the public policy debate, the ability for an artist and
their heirs to win the "hit work" lottery and enter the ranks of the new
"landed gentry**" complete with a perpetual sinecure for the heirs will be argued
as needed incentive to create.

The difference in rights (speech, privacy, search and seizure, self-help) and
the like are that for nobility vs. peasantry.  The land of course is the 
"intellectual property" -- a state grant of apparently perpetual title for
charge rents to the serfs (complete with stiff penalities for the poachers).

That it bears no semblance to a means "no more restrictive than necessary" and
yet has received a constitutional pass further shows that their are now two
(again) two distinct legal classifications of persons.  "Landed" copyright
holders (those with a critical mass of value to support their private armies
of lawyers) and the rest of us poor slobs.

That the film in question is "Citizen Kane" about the excesses
and abuses of power of one in the copyright industry and the reality that
none of the power had the meaning or enduring value of simple childhood
pleasures and the warmth of family ("Rosebud...") is deliciously
ironic.

.002

Two men walking by a rich man's tomb
Man one: "How much money did he leave behind?"
Man two: "All of it."