Dan Jones
Chickamauga, GA
Unconstitutional Copyright
I am surprised that Nick Gillespie disregards property rights to suggest that "certain characters and texts have entered the public domain in fact, if not in law" ("Tomorrow Is Another Day in Court," July).
We know when and by whom Gone With the Wind was created. Immense popularity and durability does not imply that a work has "entered the public domain in fact, if not in law." If it did, then the entire publishing, recording, and filmmaking industries would not exist. There would be no reason for authors, composers, filmmakers, and the like to create. Absent a method of controlling distribution and earning a livelihood, only amateurs would do this work for their own pleasure.
Capitalist democracies lack the patronage system of aristocratic Europe in the prior two millennia. Instead, the market supports those who produce works of intellectual and artistic value. If artists don't have the constitutional guarantee that their property can, like a house, be freely sold or licensed and passed from one generation to another, they will not be able to afford to create works of art.
As a composer, I take great solace in the fact that my property rights are protected by the law. Please contemplate this issue before defending a self-styled "parodist" who appears to be a plagiarist by any reasonable measure. We are all diminished when property rights are diluted, "re-imaginings" of bygone eras aside. Let Alice Randall create her own "characters and texts" about the slavery and reconstruction eras, if she wants to "explode myths." Or let her wait until 2036.
Jeffrey Hoffman
New York, NY
In discussing The Wind Done Gone, Nick Gillespie should ask more aggressively what right, under the Constitution, does a court have to block a derivative work 63 years after the original was published?
The correct answer should be, "None!" The copyright exception to the First Amendment (Article I, Section 8, clause 8) is only for a "limited" period and only to the extent that it "promotes" the arts. Congress acted unconstitutionally when it removed a limited term from copyright (56 years), replacing it with the indefinite life-plus-50-years (extended just recently to life-plus-70-years). There is no reason whatsoever to believe this extension promotes the arts; a potential artist who does not feel sufficiently motivated by the prospect of 56 years of royalties is not going to be lured by an even more conjectural payoff 50 years after his death. Instead, this unreasonable extension of copyright suppresses the arts, by forcing books like Ms. Randall's into expensive court battles.
Hugo S. Cunningham
Boston, MA
Nick Gillespie replies: As Hugo Cunningham points out, intellectual property rights, unlike other property rights, involve arbitrarily set time limits designed to give creators and inventors an incentive to produce work. So Jeffrey Hoffman is wrong to assert that intellectual property can, "like a house," be passed on indefinitely. I also think he is mistaken that, absent copyright in its current form, artistic production would stop. In any case, as most readers know, a higher court allowed Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone to be sold in bookstores, to no apparent injury to Margaret Mitchell's literary estate.
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