David Pierce, Wendy Hagenmaier, Carl Hagenmaier, and I were honored last month to receive the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s Award for Best Electronic Reference for the Media History Digital Library. Thank you to the PCA/ACA’s awards committee for giving our team this recognition (and four very nice plaques!).
In my research and publications, I’ve looked quite a bit at the historical relationship between media and the law. For this reason, I’m particularly excited about two additions we’ve recently made to the Media History Digital Library.
First, the published testimonies and supporting documents from the U.S. v. Motion Picture Patents Company (1912-1913) are now online. Formed in 1908, the M.P.P.C. (sometimes referred to as “the Edison Trust” or just “the Trust”) sought to control the American film industry through pooling patents and demanding that producers and exhibitors acquire licenses. Independent producers and exhibitors, who refused to license the patents, argued that the Trust was an unlawful monopoly. The District Court hearings include testimonies from both MPPC members, such as Siegmund Lubin, and “Independents” who later became Hollywood moguls, such as William Fox. Ultimately, in 1915, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the MPPC in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and spelled the end for the already weakening Trust.
Go to the MHDL’s Early Cinema Collection to see all seven volumes of testimonies and supporting documents from the U.S. District Court’s 1912-1913 lawsuit. To give credit where it’s due — the volumes were generously loaned by the Museum of Modern Art. Funding for the digitization came from Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema. Thank you to all of the Domitor members who contributed to the fundraising drive (the full list of names is here) and to Domitor’s President, Scott Curtis, for initiating the campaign. The funds are paying for the scanning of more Moving Picture World volumes and other remarkable publications.
Drawing of the Latham Loop, one of the most important technologies in the M.P.P.C.’s patent pool.
The second new addition to the MHDL is the Government & Law Collection, which charts the interplay between Hollywood, politics, and law. Most of the items in this collection were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office and digitized and sponsored by the Internet Archive. The Government & Law Collection includes extensive documentation relating to the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ infamous investigations into communists in Hollywood. You can also find documents concerning economic regulation, censorship, and juvenile delinquency.
I hope anyone who looks at the U.S. v. M.P.P.C. volumes and Government & Law Collection will see why I like to study the relationship between media and law.
The U.S. v. M.P.P.C. is an important antitrust case, but it’s equally fascinating to read for the window it offers into the early American motion picture industry. The reports on communism and juvenile delinquency speak volumes about how society projects its fears on high visibility targets, like the movie industry. For someone reading these materials today, the law provides an entry point into broader histories of society, industry, technology, and culture.
Yesterday was the IP world’s equivalent of the last day of the 2011 regular baseball season — that unbelievable night when Tampa pulled off a surprise extra-inning win, the Orioles spoiled the season-long expectations of Red Sox fans, and the Cardinals advanced as a wild card into a postseason that concluded with the Cards taking the stage as World Champs. On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, some of the world’s most popular websites — including Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist — led a highly visible advocacy campaign against the Hollywood-backed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that succeeded in raising public awareness about a bad piece of legislation and making several of members of Congress reconsider their support of the new law. On the same day, though, the Supreme Court decided in a 6-2 ruling that Congress could constitutionally remove works from the public domain in order to comply with international copyright treaties.
As Jessica Litman chronicles in her great book Digital Copyright, the major American media industries have been accustomed to being able to draft intellectual property legislation that Congress passes into law (with a few exemptions thrown in for teachers, libraries, and others with the clout or goodwill to carve out a small exception for themselves). Based on past precedent and the vibe on Capitol Hill back in December, the passage of SOPA appeared to be as sure a thing as making a bet in July that the Red Sox would reach the playoffs. The successful lobbying of the technology industries, high profile web blackouts, and the concerns the Obama administration expressed over the weekend about SOPA, however, have dashed those expectations. It bears repeating that the anti-SOPA efforts are not endorsements of commercial piracy. Some new legislation addressing the needs of media creators in the age of digital file-sharing should pass into law, but it cannot be so broadly drafted to have a chilling effect on culture and free speech (see Danny Kimball’s essay in Antenna for a more lengthy analysis of the problems in SOPA and PIPA legislation).
The Supreme Court’s decision regarding the public domain, however, marks a setback for American culture and the balance copyright law needs to strike among the interests of owners, artists, and the public (and it’s here, alas, that my underdog baseball metaphor runs out of steam). To give the Supreme Court Justices the credit they’re due, there were a number of issues at play in Golan v. Holder, including the reciprocity of trade agreements. Nevertheless, I think the Court made the wrong call, and I can’t help but wish that we could take some of yesterday’s same concern and creative advocacy expressed against SOPA and direct it toward preserving the public domain. If the anti-SOPA movement is about keeping the pipes of the net open for culture, then preserving the public domain is about the culture that moves through those pipes. A robust public domain ensures that old works can freely circulate and remain available for artists to remix and use as the basis for new creative works (these new works, by the way, can be copyrighted and make money — just ask the producers of the 3D Alice in Wonderland or the publisher of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). A robust public domain opens the potential for more projects like the Media History Digital Library, which digitizes historic magazines and trade papers for broad public access. The public domain also unleashes creative possibilities for these projects. In the case of the Media History Digital Library, for instance, we are already thinking about how we can use computer analytics to look for patterns across film history that are hard or impractical to detect reading page-by-page or through keyword searching. Because the data we are analyzing belongs in the public domain, we can share it widely for re-use and re-analysis.
Congress should not be able to embark on the slippery slope of restoring copyrights to works that have already entered the public domain. If the American media industries lobby for new laws that further extend the duration of copyright protection or restore copyright status to American works that already belong to the public domain, let’s make sure we go to bat for the public domain in the same way we did against SOPA!
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Golan v. Holder, an important case for the future of our ability to engage with culture in America. Golan challenges the restoration of copyright status to foreign works that were previously public domain. The shrinking of the public domain resulted from a provision in the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act. American artists can no longer freely draw from Metropolis (1927) and The Third Man (1949). No public performances of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” or Hitchcock’s classic film, The Third Man (1935), are permitted any more without licensing the rights.
Peter Decherney’s New York Times op-ed eloquently makes the case for our need to maintain a robust public domain. He highlights the ways that the public domain has historically benefited creators both small and large. Remember Disney’s recent billion dollar grossing 3D version of Alice in Wonderland (2010)? Yep, based on a public domain story.
The solution is not to erase all copyrights. Good copyright policy offers a balance. Disney should have a chance to recoup its costs and turn a profit through controlling the exclusive rights to its 3D version. Eventually, though, even this version of Alice — like Lewis Carrol’s story — should enter the public domain. As Decherney points out, it’s a slippery slope once we start granting new copyrights to public domain works. What is stopping Congress from bulldozing over even more of the public domain?
Over the past year, I have been coordinating the digitization of media industry trade papers and fan magazines for the Media History Digital Library. The project is only feasible because of the public domain. We could not afford to provide broad public access to so many different periodicals if we were working with materials under copyright protection. We want to continue to provide readers with free access to historic media publications from around the world. Looking toward the Supreme Court’s highly anticipated decision and beyond, I hope the US will chart the copyright course that enables widespread engagement with history and culture.
As I discuss in the International Journal of Learning and Media, digital media offers a tremendous set of tools for accessing and remixing public domain material. It’s our domain. Please use it, before we lose it.
We are deeply grateful and humbled by the tremendous feedback we’ve received about the Media History Digital Library’s website. Since we launched on Monday, we’ve received messages from enthusiastic users in Australia, England, Canada, Ireland, Germany, and across the United States. Thank you to everyone who sent us a note, blogged about us, “liked” us on Facebook, or simply went to the site and opened a magazine.
One of my favorite e-mail replies was, “I am now trying to lift my jaw from the floor.” The response came from Katherine Spring, a dynamic young media historian at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Katherine Spring’s research into the relationship between the film industry and popular music industry in the late-1920s is exemplary of the type of detailed, cross-industry research we hope to enable more of as our collection grows. Her work also shows how the writing of film history depends not simply on preservation and access to films, but also to the documents, periodicals, and other materials of the era.
We’re also thrilled by our response so far in the blogosphere. We’ve received complimentary coverage on the New Yorker blog, Film Studies for Free, and Metafilter.
Our greatest praise of all comes from Luke McKernan, the Moving Image Lead Curator at the British Library. Writing on his blog The Bioscope, Luke McKernan wrote:
The Media History Digital Library represents a real tipping point for film research. We’ve gone beyond the point when it was quite fun to find a few texts available online, to supplement our visits to research libraries and perusing through microfilms. This is the new research library. This is where the bread-and-butter research documentation upon which we all depend is going to be found from now on. This is where we will now make our discoveries, and new kinds of discoveries too, as online research tools leads to new forms of analysis, new associations, and new conclusions. And we’ve only just started.
This is high praise, the sort that makes you blush. We’re not sure if we’re worthy of such distinction, but we promise to work tirelessly and do everything in our power to earn it.
As I was building the website for the Media History Digital Library, I figured it was high time I do something with the domain I purchased a little while back — www.erichoyt.org. So here we go. I am using this new website for my professional activities as a researcher, writer, and teacher. I will keep the blog active as I wind my way through conferences and encounter materials that may be of interests to others in my field and related disciplines.
In the meantime, I encourage you to explore the Media History Digital Library. David Pierce founded this project, and I serve as the Digitization Coordinator. We’ve digitized over 150,000 pages of public domain film trade papers and fan magazines. We also just launched a new website that I designed with Wendy Hagenmaier, a tremendous young archivist at the University of Texas School of Information who also happens to be my sister-in-law. We still have much to do on the Media History Digital Library — an advanced search function to develop, millions more pages to scan. But, as I hope you’ll agree, we’re off to a pretty good start!
