Culture

Today celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. It will be a celebration without the most important documentary covering the Civil Rights Movement, Eyes on the Prize. The documentary from the 80s now falls under the ridiculously extended terms of the DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The cost of new licensing, comes in at some $500,000 a crack, a price the studios cannot afford to pay---again.

I listened to a particularly intelligent assessment on the problems with big corporations on PRI. Nowhere was it mentioned that not all corporations behave alike. Some are highly competitive fresh and of the new information age economy. Others are over the hill but survive by engineered scarcity and criminal monopolistic behaviors, a dying breed from a passing era. The later are entrenched with enormous power. Government has made little insightful effort to thwart the abuses of monopolies, cartels and just plain collusions to extort.

These criminal activities emerge as a waning gasp from Industrial Age behemoths with entrenched, top-heavy administrations and tired products. The monopolies pose an apolitical problem in that both Democrats and Republicans are in their pockets. Cartels valorize legislative advantages that perpetuate their greed. The DMCA is clearly such a bonanza. Copyright was already extended far beyond the constitutional provision for its existence. Now the longer terms of protection threaten schools, music, movies, artists, our children, even libraries and our very culture. Not only is culture restricted by monopolistic pricing, it is locked away to generate demand, not for what reflects as our culture but for the prurient crap that the music industry and the motion picture industry push in our face. Do I sound like a grandfather, you bet, but ask yourself why MLK is locked up once again as the documentary remains in a vault of greed.