In an ever-expanding digital age, where AI scrapes published images and text to create problematic facsimiles and corporations can erase whole libraries of music or books that people thought they owned, how far will the law go in staking out the “protection” of objects in the public domain?
Michelangelo’s David has been a towering figure in Italian culture since its completion in 1504. But in the current era of the quick buck, curators worry the marble statue’s religious and political significance is being diminished by the thousands of refrigerator magnets and other souvenirs sold around Florence focusing on David’s genitalia.
The Galleria dell’Accademia’s director, Cecilie Hollberg, has positioned herself as David’s defender since her arrival at the museum in 2015, taking swift aim at those profiteering from his image, often in ways she finds “debasing.”
In that way, she is a bit of a David herself against the Goliath of unfettered capitalism with its army of street vendors and souvenir shop operators hawking aprons of the statue’s nude figure, T-shirts of it engaged in obscene gestures, and ubiquitous figurines, often in Pop Art neon.
At Hollberg’s behest, the state’s attorney office in Florence has launched a series of court cases invoking Italy’s landmark cultural heritage code, which protects artistic treasures from disparaging and unauthorized commercial use. The Accademia has won hundreds of thousands of euros (dollars) in damages since 2017, Hollberg said.
Copyright law, while appearing pretty straight forward, can be a field full of landmines for any person wishing to publish images or snippets of text or music, not of their own creation. Even sharing one’s own copy of “X” can be hazardous.
Remember Napster?
It appears that Italy, wishes to have complete control over its “cultural heritage”. And yet, what this law does is extend in perpetuity the creator’s copyright for the benefit of “the museum or institution that owns it.”
Disney would faint in ecstasy if handed that kind of power.
On the one hand, Disney pushed for the law that extended the copyright term to 95 years, which became referred to derisively as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” This extension has been criticized by scholars as being economically regressive and having a devastating effect on our ability to digitize, archive, and gain access to our cultural heritage. It locked up not just famous works, but a vast swath of our culture, including material that is commercially unavailable. Even though calling it the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” may overstate Disney’s actual role in the legislative process – the measure passed because of a much broader lobbying effort – Disney was certainly a prominent supporter, and the Mouse was sometimes a figurehead.
On the other hand, Disney itself is a talented and successful practitioner of building upon the public domain. In fact, the public domain is Disney’s bread and butter. Frozen was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. The Lion King draws from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Biblical stories, and possibly an epic poem about the founder of the Mali Empire.[3] Fantasia’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” comes from a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and in other segments the Fantasia film showcases public domain classical music. Alice in Wonderland, Snow White,The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio came from stories by Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and Carlo Collodi.
In the case of David and the ubiquitous hawkers of knockoff flotsam for tourists, one gets the feeling this kind of thing started after 5 minutes after it was unveiled in 1504 in public square in Florence, Italy.
Copyright law is written to protect the property of the creator and allow the creator (and his/her immediate family) to enjoy the fruits of their labor in its creation. For a limited time. Locking up such works from passing into the public domain, or limiting public domain because of cultural heritage, is counter-productive. Reproduction, derivative works, etc, of public domain works in reality exposes new audiences to the original works. Think of audiences worldwide that may have never heard of Hans Christian Anderson without Disney’s The Little Mermaid? I should make a note here I am not passing any judgement on the derivative nature of Disney’s work at all. Love it or hate it, it exposed Anderson to new generations of readers.
But there is a nefarious side to laws, like Italy’s, that lock up public domain creations. As we’ve seen in museum after museum, the woke are increasingly in charge. And if your digital library of games or music or even books can be disappeared for any reason, what’s stopping institutions from removing the paintings or statues of dead white males – like Michelanglo – from public view? David is made of marble … and marble shatters.
Italy and other countries eager to pass similar laws, should be careful what they wish for.
featured image, cropped, Adobe stock standard license
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Author: Darleen Click
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