Hollywood Property Values
In this article, titled “Hollywood Property Values”, in The Ethicist section of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, author Randy Cohen is asked a question pertaining to whether or not Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, steal the idea of Facebook from someone else. Cohen launches into a tirade about how copyright laws subdue creativity and innovation. He makes an analogy about how Eric Clapton might play a riff in his solo that is taken straight out of a Muddy Waters song, but that’s not copyright infringement, its expanding and creating something great. Cohen asserts that if Muddy Waters were to act like a movie studio, Clapton would be “crushed” under the weight of copyright law.
I totally agree with Cohen here. Almost all music today is derived straight from the blues and it can all be traced back. What makes music so unique is that since there really are no strict copyright laws, it is free to evolve and new sounds are able to arise and thrive. If stingy copyright laws were lifted from movies and other things, maybe there would be more creativity in the industry, rather than seeing the same crap being churned out year by year. The original copyright law was made so that the originators had 14 years to make a profit from their idea, and after that it was free to be used and to create new ideas.
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