As usual, Dan Gilmor cuts to the chase. Once again this proves that copyright is not about the artists, but only about the large corporate entities that suck down their talents in order to make money and perpetuate their strangleholds on innovation and creation. This is why the Internet is such a threat to them - people like the brothers who created JibJab can bring a work to the masses and totally circumvent their stranglehold.
The late, great Woody Guthrie is surely spinning in his grave today, in fury over what is happening with one of his most memorable songs, "This Land is Your Land."
But Guthrie would not be even slightly unhappy at the use of his immortal tune by the JibJab folks, whose brilliant satire of George Bush and John Kerry has become one of the most popular animations ever to hit the Web or any other medium.
No, Guthrie would be thrilled. He was a folk singer. Like all other folk singers he borrowed from others to create his art. As his son, Arlo, once said:
"We've heard some of the people talk about some of the songs he wrote tonight. And the truth is, he did steal old songs from other places. He took the old gospel songs, he took the old traditional ballads, and he put his words to them like we heard tonight. People still called it stealing. Plagarism, bad words like that, 'til Pete Seeger come along and renamed it the folk process. I think my dad's theory was that if you wanted people to be singing along with you on your new song, it'd be a hell of a start if they already knew the tune. Or even some of words."Woody Guthrie wrote scathingly of people who steal more with fountain pens than guns. He would have loathed the people who abuse copyright so much today, trying to restrict all kinds of fair use, of which parody is an absolutely protected example.
Guthrie wanted credit for what he wrote, but he had contempt for severe legal restrictions on what others might do with it. According to Pete Seeger, in this account (widely acknowledged in the folk world to be true) from the Museum of Musical Instruments, when Guthrie was singing on the radio in Los Angeles during the Depression, he'd mail mimeographed songs to listeners, and wrote on one:
"“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”I'll bet, therefore, that Woody would be horrified -- and angered -- by the behavior of an outfit called The Richmond Organization, which controls the copyright to his music. This humor-impaired crew has gone ballistic and has launched legal threats (CNN) at JibJab.
The Richmond Organization is dishonoring Woody Guthrie's memory, not that it seems to care. But it's giving us one more example of how the copyright system has abandoned common sense. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Posted by ooblick at July 28, 2004 10:59 AM