no CoPyright and no CuLtura L Cong LomeratesNo copyright and no cultural market dominationCopyright has increasingly become an instrument for securing huge investment. in
the past decade, it has become one of the major driving forces of Western economies,
in particular, the us economy. This development, however, has a major downside:
companies owning massive amounts of copyrighted works can, at their whim, ban
weaker cultural activities not only from the marketplace but also from the general
audience’s attention. This is happening before our very eyes. it is almost impossible to
ignore the blockbuster movies, bestselling books and chart- topping records presented
to us by these cultural giants that own almost every imaginable right to these works.
as a result, most people are completely unaware of all those other, less commercialized
activities taking place in music, literature, cinema, theatre and other arts. This is a
tremendous loss to society, because our democratic world can only truly thrive on a
wide diversity of cultural expression, freely expressed and discussed.
There are even fewer numbers of increasingly large and powerful entities that own
the exclusive rights to ever more works in the fields of literature, cinema, music and
graphic arts. For example, Corbis collects vast amounts of images from all over the
world. Together with getty images, Corbis is developing into an oligopoly in the field
of photographs and reproductions of paintings and other images – in other words, an
entity that has a large amount of control over the market. The oligopoly has control
over which artistic works we may use for which purposes, and under which conditions.
in most cultures around the world this state of affairs was – and in some cases still is
- highly undesirable, even unthinkable. artists have always used and built upon other
artists’ works to create new works of art. indeed, it is hard to imagine that the works
of shakespeare, Bach, and countless other cultural heavyweights could have come
into existence without this principle of freely building on the work of predecessors.
Yet, what do we see happening now? Take, for example, documentary filmmakers who
nowadays face almost insurmountable obstacles owing to the fact that their work
almost inevitably contains fragments of copyrighted pictorial or musical content, the
use of which requires both consent from the copyright owner and payment of a fee. The
latter is almost always beyond the documentary maker’s means, and the former gives
the copyright owner full rights to restrict the use of the artistic content exclusively to
ways the owner deems appropriate.
instrumental questions arise from this situation for the artists. For example, how
can one accept that most existing cultural creations may not be used in a new work,
or reworked and forged into a new creation? What kind of society do we live in that
permits a great number of artistic creations to be frozen, unable to be changed and
doomed to remain in the state the ‘owner’ of those works pleases?
Where in this scheme of things are our human rights? human rights should guarantee
freedom of communication. The free exchange of ideas and cultural expression is
what greatly helped build our modern society. This human cultural development will,
however, grind to a halt if a mere handful of persons or companies can call themselves
‘owners’ of the majority of pictures, texts and melodies that our society has brought
forth. This puts them in a position where they alone can dictate whether we can
make use of a substantial part of our collective human cultural achievement, and on
which terms and conditions. The consequences are detrimental: we are being made