CONTENT MAY OR MAY NOT BE ‘KING’ in today’s Cyber-Epoch, depending on who’s playing the role of cyber-economy pundit today.
But even if “content” isn’t the most important piece of the media-biz recipe, it’s still a prized one.
And the folks hoarding the biggest content-stockpiles, the media mega-conglomerates, are doing their politician-buyin’ best to make sure they can hold onto their chokehold of control and even grab a little more.
We’ve regularly written in this space about the media giants’ continuing attempts to consolidate, to grow ever more gargantuan in spite of much fiscal evidence that the buzzworded “synergies” of such mergers seldom pan out.
We’ve also written about the FCC’s bold attempt to open up the FM airwaves to low-power community broadcasters, and of the media giants’ intense lobbying efforts to get that quashed. So far, the FCC’s stuck to its guns. We’ll see whether the corporate-owned Congress succeeds in overturning the commisisoners’ will on this.
There’s another front on which the corporate warriors are battling to capture more territory: copyright law.
Last fall, Congress was PAC-persuaded to rush through yet another extension to copyright laws, giving company-owned works even more years of ownership (as well as extending the scope of such ownership privileges).
It was lobbied for mainly by the big movie studios, which want to make sure all talking pictures remain under copyright protection forever. While the trademarks and merchandising rights to such characters as Mickey Mouse and Superman go on for as long as their owners keep them in use, the films themselves were to have passed into the public domain after 75 years–which would have let anyone make and sell a copy of, say, the original Lugosi Dracula by 2006.
Now, it’ll be a couple decades more. And by then, if not sooner, the studios will be back to Congress pleading for one more extension.
As ex-local writer Jesse Walker recently noted, the media giants are pushing the intellectual-property envelope on many other fronts as well. They’re threatening the makers of fandom websites for TV shows, trying to narrow the “fair use doctrine” that lets reviewers and scholars quote from copyrighted books, cracking down on music MP3 trading and home-taping, and even rewriting recording contracts so CDs become “works for hire” the recording artists will never be able to regain control of.
When anybody complains about the power of Big Media in this country, the media companies either make pious First Amendment arguments about the need for a “press” unfettered by government constraints or points with scorn to the supposedly shoddy and unpopular products of subsidized/regulated culture industries in places like France.
They don’t like it when you point out that America’s own culture industry’s heavily, though indirectly, subsidized by all these sweetheart laws.
Or that there’s a difference between keeping investigative journalism uncensored and keeping the Rupert Murdochs in their Lear jets.
TOMORROW: The Soundtracking of America, and my attempt to add to the cacophany.
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