Building on Tuesday’s post about the threat of copyright and restrictive creative contracts on new forms of expression, this article in the Financial Times exposes the flip-side of the same constraints: the challenge of bringing existing media content onto new distribution platforms.
That is because the contractual arrangements that have long governed business relations between media companies and “the talent” — actors, directors, writers and other artists — never contemplated the commercial opportunities presented by the iPod, video-on-demand or other emerging media venues.
The article focuses on the back catalogs of television shows, sitting in warehouses constrained by creative contracts rather than flowing onto iPods and web sites for cash. While older sit-coms may not meet your criteria for “heritage content,” the story gives an important view of something you might care more about — any and all existing media of essential creative works.
If a busload of lawyers and the promise of cash can’t readily resolve ownership issues in commercial television, imagine how hard it will be to get nonprofit content cleared for take-off. For example, shouldn’t you or your children or their children have access to video recordings of Martha Graham, Balanchine’s early works in New York, seminal theater productions of Mamet or Miller, or musical performances by the legends of every discipline? If you think so, there’s a web of creative ownership rights standing in the way of that access.
There’s a whole generation of extraordinary content captured on video and film that is nearly impossible to clear for public viewing — on-line or otherwise. That’s not just a threat to future creations and creators, but to the very memory of our world that great art represents.
It’s a sweeping generalization to characterize the inability to clear extraordinary content already captured on video and film for viewing as a threat to future creators or to their memory — we still perform and are influenced by classical theatre despite an inability to capture those performances electronically. People created all manner of performing arts for centuries before electronic media allowed us to record performances.
I think the problem with trying to untangle the web of ownership rights has more to do with people believing their ownership stake is worth much more than it really is. If people understood that they had the potential to make pennies per viewing, rather than dollars, it would likely be much easier to get these issues resolved. Isn’t on of the maxims of the internet age that “information (read content) wants to be free?”
I interviewed the CTO for Creative Commons this week at Net Squared (http://netsquared.org/linksvayer), which might be of interest. We also included a section on legal enforcement.