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Why the Public Domain Matters

By David Bollier

[From the corresponding section of Public Knowledge]

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"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Isaac Newton

This information isn't meant to promote "stealing" ideas, nor does it attack the rights of authors and creators, inventors and innovators. It is simply meant to get us all thinking about our shared cultural heritage and about how many things -- great works of art and literature, contemporary movies and dime-store novels, and even innovations in science and software -- are the result of a kind of information "infection."

Intellectual innovation -- ideas in whatever form -- are the result of a chain reaction that may happen immediately or last for centuries.People live in communities, not in isolation. So do ideas. Communities of information have to be passed down from one generation to the next and spread from one society to another.

A Wellspring of Creativity

The public domain is, in a very real sense, the catalyst and wellspring for creativity and innovation. Where would Disney be without the Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Hans Christian Anderson, Kipling, or classical mythology? Where would Aaron Copland have been without American folk songs? Picasso without African art? Even Duchamp without his urinal? Public domain appropriators, one and all.

It is part of our role in life to make songs and stories our own, to transform pop culture into what the sociologist Gary Fine calls idioculture, the idiosyncratic adaptation of mass culture that occurs in families and communities. An authentic cultural democracy, Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard have noted, "requires active participation in cultural life, not just passive consumption of cultural products."

The Economic Value of the Public Domain: A Free (or pretty darn cheap) Public Domain

There is another type of value associated with the public domain -- an economic value. Simply stated, works in the public domain cost less. The reason you can purchase The Iliad for a song is because no one owns it. No royalty costs need to be figured into the replication costs. Just as copyright offers an incentive to creators, so too the public domain, with its low costs, offer creators an economic incentive of a sort. It offers cheap content -- to be used, reformulated, and recast. West Side Story emerges from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; Amadeus emerges from the music of Mozart and Salieri.

Preserving a Healthy Public Domain

So, what else is the public domain for than for adapting ancient stories and telling them in updated and different situations? The public domain is part of a healthy information environment, an ecosystem of information. To remain healthy and robust, a balance must exist between licenses, copyrights, patents, and freely available information. Primarily due to new legislation responding to new technologies, the information commons has fallen out of balance. Nothing new will really enter the public domain for the next 20 years. This will have a major impact of people's need to communicate, to share ideas, to pass down traditional knowledge, to participate in popular culture. Whether a writer or scientist, issues surrounding Intellectual Property and the Public Domain affect us all. Journalists who are being forced to sign over the rights to their writings for the next 95 years to their employers will be allied with the genetic researchers who can't study breast cancer genes because of patents.

Contributing to the Public Domain

Recognizing the intrinsic value of this information commons and the public domain is the point of this book. So, say you've been convinced? Now what?

Consider donating works to the public domain or to consortiums like the Creative Commons.

Think about what things are too valuable to be owned. Consider that copyright protection can sometimes encourage new artists and creators to keep traditional works alive. Think about the compromises that we can make so that creators and consumers both get a fair shake financially and in terms of access.



Animation Empire: A Story of Walt Disney

It could be argued that Disney is one of the most frequent appropriators of public domain characters.

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was a pioneer animator, producer and entrepreneur. Starting with Little Red Riding Hood in 1922, Disney animated fairy tales throughout the 20th century. The success of "Disney's Folly" the feature length cartoon of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) paved the way for Disney Inc.'s eventual domination of the children's fairy tales industry with productions of Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Mary Poppins (1963) within Walt Disney's lifetime.

The characteristic Disney fairy tale formulas were evident from the 1937 Snow White. Since the stories were generally short and simple, Disney added material from the formula of early melodramas, Heroes, heroines, and comic sidekicks. Disney also heightened the treatment of love, sex, and marriage. Formerly treated in a more "matter-of-fact" way in traditional folktales, Disney versions emphasized true love, with love at first sight being the preferred type.

In Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, all three fall in love with their Princes before the identity of either is fully established. Things that seemed inhumane were also changed - Snow White's evil stepmother falls to her death in a semi-natural catastrophe (a stone rolling down a mountain) rather than being forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes at her stepdaughter's wedding. Disney makes Snow White an orphan. His dwarfs are hardworking and individualized with human characteristics, while Grimms' dwarves are anonymous and play a very small role. Their song - Hi Ho It's Off to Work We Go - calls up the American Depression and the importance of every man's part in the economic recovery. Snow White awakens not when a dwarf stumbles while carrying the glass coffin of the Brothers Grimm tale, but only when she receives a kiss from the prince, the only antidote to the Queen's poison. The fate of Cinderella's stepsisters is not mentioned at all in Disney's version, while the Brother's Grimm version has the stepsisters' eyes pecked out by the heroine's bird allies.

Other Americanization included Disney's simplistic treatment of royalty - either well meaning comic types or utterly malevolent, the portrayal of characters as American teenagers in voice and manner, and the mechanization of magic by emphasizing laboratories, magic wands, and other machines to reference modern American technology. Heroines resemble the American "beauty ideal" of the day - Snow White is flat chested as a flapper, while Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are Monror-esque in their curves. Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989) and the other heroines of the 1990s movies are multicultural Barbie doll types.

Works in the public domain inspired a whole line of animated films that Disney used to build a very profitable industry and brand identification. The familiarity of the stories made them accessible to the target audience -- children -- but Disney added their own spin to make them immediately identifiable as Disney products. We can expand this beyond fairy tales. Disney was also inspired by The Jungle Book (Kipling), Peter Pan (Barrie), and Alice in Wonderland (Carroll). Were these works all in the public domain when Disney used them?

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