I just got done watching The Three Musketeers, and couldn’t help noticing how much it resembled The Musketeer, not to mention characters from The Man in the Iron Mask, and that’s just from movies within the last ten years. Of course, the similarity is obvious, as they’re all based on the novels of Alexandre Dumas, written roughly 150 years ago. It’s easy to see why Hollywood has used Dumas as a source again and again and again. The Three Musketeers may be THE classic adventure story, and it’s hard to mess up a movie if you know the story has enduring appeal.
It got me to thinking. What if the current media congloms get their way, and copyright becomes essentially permanent, eternal? What if such changes to the law work retroactively, like the Bono Act, so that everything in the public domain reverts to the heirs of the original copyright holders? Would we have seen 10 Things I Hate About You and O if the studios had had to track down the legitimate heirs of “Wild Bill” Shakespeare and pay a hefty licensing fee?
Clearly, copyright must have limits. Anything over the term of a human lifespan does a disservice to humanity. Storytelling is an evolutionary art. We build on the stories that come before our own, and sometimes just retell those same old stories in modern language. New stories grow from the old, not from nothingness.
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