The Complete Metropolis: Thinking About a More Sensible Copyright
Let’s get one thing out of the way now: I believe that copyright serves a legitimate purpose in our society. If an artist or creator puts their labor into a work, they deserve some degree of control over that product, including over distribution, sales, and so on. This article (and all original works on this site) use a Creative Commons license that reserves certain rights of copy, while forfeiting others in manner that seems sane to me. But I truly do understand why a musician, filmmaker, or other professional content creator/owner might impose stronger restrictions. They make a living on their content and it seems unfair to say the least that someone else would take away their income by reselling that content without permission or reimbursement. While in my view, the legitimate justification for copyright falls short of applying to personal copies, remixes, mashups, collage, parody/satire/détournement, and other (re-)interpretation (e.g. the above image is not theft, though it might be a crime in the artistic sense); that’s not the focus of this post. Nor is imagining an alternative culture or economy in which copyright doesn’t exist. Instead I want to focus in on how overly strict copyright enforcement can actually hinder economic activity, and reduce the long-term impact of artistic creations, leading culturally significant works to die in obscurity. I think Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 silent film, Metropolis, serves as a nice example for a number of reasons.
