Investigation Blogpost

Copyright Law And It's Affects on Cinema



    Copyright is undeniably a good thing for the artistic world, it makes sure that creators are able to profit off their works for considerable amounts of time, but also eventually lets these works fade into public domain and enter the large collection of free and open works. That's how its supposed to work at least, but now we are entering an era of corporate owned works and creative expression, where the there's no singular person who owns the copyright, so how does this affect movies and other creative industries. Copyright was initially meant to be 28 years, so right now, if the original law was still in place, almost every Marvel hero, Superman, Star Wars, and much more would be public domain and anyone with a camera could make their own films with these characters. Over the years the copyright length has been expanded to the life of the creator plus 70 years. One thing to remember about this is that these expansions have been lobbied for by companies like Disney, who started their media empire by taking characters from public domain. The relationship between Copyright and Public domain is that of a complicated one, there has to be protection and monetary incentives for creators to keep making artistic work, but the world of art is built on remixing what has come before, so there has to be a point in which anyone can adapt and profit from older work.

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