My experience + Washington and Money

I have had a few instances in which my creativity was constrained because of the copyright law. One instance is when I led a sales team to develop a t-shirt for St. Patrick’s Day. I wanted to create Bucky within the context of the Irish theme. After submitting my work to a shirt designer, I received an email that I had to use an original picture of Bucky. Several days later, I informed the Dean who I was using to manufacture the t-shirts. I set up and prepared almost everything so the t-shirts would be distributed to everybody who ordered them before spring break. I was told that the Bucky copyright (trademark?) that the university held only allowed certain t-shirt manufacturers to create this logo on t-shirts. I was at least allowed to reproduce the Bucky b/c of the umbrella I had in being under a University sponsored club. However, the damage I would I have inflicted if I were to distort the image of Bucky would be detrimental to the logo. So after all the hassle my creativity and possible success of the sales run was inhibited. Recently I developed a website for a water ski team, and again my creativity was inhibited as I wanted to ‘poster’ the website with the MasterCraft logo’s, picture, and videos because the boat we used was manufactured by MasterCraft. However I was not allowed to do this after some research and left the website more plain and boring than I wanted it to be. Yes, these are related to trademarks too, but they fall under ‘intellectual property’. The first instance included commercial transformative work that is banned by copyright laws and trademark laws. The second instance was original commercial material that I was trying to utilize. In both experiences, I can totally understand the implications. Having thousands of transformed Buckys’ would dilute the logo. People would ask while watching a commercial or seeing a friends t-shirt, “Is that the original Bucky or a fake one?” Lessig says that copyright (as does trademark) scope has extended to far into the noncommercial uses. I believe this statement to be true. However it also limits free culture and impeded on my creativity to create something totally unique. Here free culture and creativity blends with copyright laws if you can imagine it in your head as a Venn diagram. Should my and others creativity be allowed to flourish or should copyright owners be allowed their uses over their material. Creativity should be allowed to develop and a copyright owner should have exclusive rights to original and transformative commercial work; a balance thus results. However, both extremes are irrational in developing and nurturing our culture in the right way. Now, if I can come up with this blog post from my own experiences, why can’t Washington not create a balance where they can create a culture where there is a vast public domain that includes noncommercial use and copyrights that are only limited to perhaps 40 years. One answer is lobbyists paying them. Do other people in Washington that keeps checks and balances on Congress not see this. Perhaps if there are no other explanations than money flowing into the pockets of politicians, then our whole system of democracy may travel to something farther away from the kind of government we had 50 years ago. (and yes it is a bad thing if a few large companies influence issues that hurts the general public) Things will have no checks and balances and it will spiral out of control. Does anybody have any rational explanations, other than money, to why politicians would extend copyright’s scope to noncommercial use and extending the copyright terms to over 90 years? If not we could be in trouble.