If this were yesterday, you could have gone to Peanutweeter.com and enjoyed the pairing of one frame from the classic Charles Schultz Peanuts strip with a somewhat random Tweet. These little connections, injecting an old piece of creative expression with a really current connection to our times, would have made your day better. Charles Schultz brought a lot of delight to people for many years. He died in 2000. I’m convinced he was up there, somewhere, enjoying Peanutweeter’s creative approach to bringing his work into the light again. Until yesterday, anyway.
Even though copyright law has expanded far beyond the original scope given by the Constitution, it was at least partly humanized by the Fair Use provision. This blogger has already made the case that Peanutweeter is fair use, so I’ll just link to his post. I’m more concerned with how non-human life-forms have been given even more control. Used to be you’d hear about how “lawyers” from McDonalds, Disney, or Paramount were out suing the best customers of their products. It was bad–but lawyers are technically human. Iconix is a “Brand Group.” If you go to the site and click on either Management or Board of Directors under their “About Us,” you get a list of “people” (though long since soul-sucked) towards the bottom. But the image that loads first is one of those generic “Gap Kid” collections. Those aren’t people, and they are certainly not the board of directors.
Iconix is a version of the corporate life-form that we’ve inexplicably given human rights to for a couple centuries now. Soul-less though it may be, at least it had to act through humans. Until some group of idiots passed the digital millennium copyright act. With it’s automatic take-down provisions, and anti-circumvention provisions, the DMCA allows non-human lifeforms to crush human creativity automatically. No lawyer-to-lawyer arguments, just a letter to the service provider. Down comes fun, and the cost of fighting it is too high for mere humans to undertake. Victory to Iconix, without ever having to face a real person in a fair fight. Iconix (or Skynet, as it probably calls itself when it’s sitting around with other soul-less life-forms) can go back to stalking across the landscape “touching every segment of retail distribution from the luxury market to the mass market” and sucking the brains out of the crushed bodies that get stuck between its toes.