The Law and the Profits

Below is my column from the August 2015 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.

Copyright law protects artists from having their work used for free. It is an understandable safeguard for creative people. It is not, however, supposed to last forever. Eventually, music or literature and other works pass into what is known as the Public Domain and anyone can use or copy them.

Unfortunately, Mickey Mouse disagreed with that. Minnie probably did as well. Their empire, the huge corporation known as The Walt Disney Company, wanted to keep Mick, Min and other properties of the eponymous founder Walt, from passing into the public domain.

In 1998, with others, Disney pushed to get rights extended according to the copyright office circular from 50 years to the “life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier.” Bill Clinton signed what is known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act into law.

Winnie the Pooh et al are safe within the good old Disney stable as well as many other characters.

Well you say so what? How do we as American people suffer because a corporation gets to keep properties they have arguably done good things with?

What the copyright extension displays is the American system of crony capitalism. Disney is a huge entity, but it is not the biggest player in the American economy, yet Mickey and some other corporations easily gamed the system.

One hopes no one is naive enough to believe the citizenry rose up to demand that their elected representatives save cartoon characters from the vicissitudes of the free market. We can safely assume that no campaign funds were harmed as our solons served the national interest.

Crony Capitalism is hardly limited to the frivolous aspects of American culture. It transpires that the same legislature that handed over intellectual property policy is about to give away far more to powerful interests that dwarf the might of Disney.

Congress recently debated a bill without disclosing what was in it. The Trans Pacific Partnership or TPP is a vast proposal covering many aspects of trade, from digital communications to agricultural policy. It is Crony Capitalism raised to a power.

It's difficult to criticize because it's a secret to all but a few and they're not talking because they can't. Politico's Michael Wessel, as a cleared advisor, has got to see it, but can't say much. He notes, “The government has created a perfect Catch 22: The law prohibits us from talking about the specifics of what we’ve seen, allowing the president to criticize us for not being specific.”

As mentioned above, this is a bill encompassing many areas of the economy. Like most, some aspects interest me more than others. As an organic gardener, I have always avoided GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) seed. We do our best not to eat food grown from GMO sources. You may think me some goofy granola and that may be true. Still, people should have the right to know what they are eating.

In America, support has been growing for the labeling of GMO foods. Some states have laws to that effect and more are likely to. The trade agreement could short-circuit that, giving authority to international bodies. This is hardly surprising as the chief agricultural negotiator for the US is the former Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddique. Monsanto is the chief purveyor of GMO seed in this country.

Now, even if GMO seeds are not harmful in and of themselves, why is there such a struggle to keep them from being labeled? Should not we great unwashed at least have the right to our informed folly?

Being an average man, I do my best to be informed, but when it comes to science, there is only so much the layperson can know. It comes down to who do you trust. That's what we do in elections. From the results of most presidential contests, we tend to disagree within a few percentage points. In 2008 Obama was elected with a healthy 53% to 46%. Good, but not a coronation. He made a campaign promise in 2007 to require the labeling of genetically modified foods. Like presidents going back to the beginning of the Republic, he did not keep his word and is now full on for TPP.

Clearly, the 600 corporate advisors who have input into the agreement are having their way with the country's economy. The citizenry will not be consulted. The mere change of chief executive will mean little. Bush would have done the same thing and Clinton pushed NAFTA.

Maybe Bernie Sanders or Jim Webb would be different, but they are not going to get elected.

We have referred the question to our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Political Theater. We tasked them to find a reform to obviate the power of the few in economic matters. Alas, they could come up with nothing. As they opined before in this publication, there is no philosophers stone of government. They did note, the longer a nation lasts, more is centralized in the hands of a few. Their final conclusion, everything eventually reduces to its absurd.

Maybe it's just my paranoia, but it is impossible for me to disagree with Lily Tomlin, “No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up.”

Review of Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

The sinking of the Lusitania is still controversial a century later.  Below is my review as submitted to the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the August, 2015 issue.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

By Erik Larson

Crown, 2015

Hardcover, 448 pages

ISBN-10: 030

ISBN-13: 978-0307408868

List: $28.00 Amazon: $15.40

Book review by Richard Morchoe

Just over a hundred years ago a great ship sank off the coast of Ireland during a brutal war. In and of itself, that should not have been a major historical event. Many vessels would be sunk during that conflict, yet the torpedoing of RMS Lusitania generated the most controversy and is so even today.

There are many reasons for that, maybe the biggest one is wrong. If you went to school in this country in the 50s or 60s, it was easy to come away with the impression that the sinking of the ocean liner was the casus belli that led our country to fight Germany in the First World War. As a history nerd, I knew there were others, but the timeline had escaped my awareness.

Setting things straight for me was journalist Erik Larson in his book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. According to the author, “I always had the impression, shared I suspect by many, that the sinking immediately drove President Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany, when in fact America did not enter World War I for another two years-half the span of the entire war.”

That's a nice bit of information for those of us with historical myopia, but it is hardly the whole book or even the most important aspect. I had not read anything by Erik Larson, and though that does not make one's life an empty desert, I have been missing out. An author of several books, the man knows how to spin a yarn.

I have a personal reason for reading Dead Wake. Much of my family comes from near where the sinking took place. The Lusitania went down just off the Old Head of Kinsale, a peninsula jutting out into the sea in Southern Ireland. Some of my relatives still farm in the area.

Ireland is an old country and it is not the biggest event to have happened in the region. Kinsale has suffered invasions and massacres and battles. The town itself celebrates its Spanish connection far more than the Lusitania. That said, the demise of the Cunard Liner is not forgotten.

As I was reading the book, it seemed Mr. Larson displayed a tad of Anglophilia. Nothing wrong with that. England is the mommy country, from whom we get some useful ideas such as trial by jury and habeas corpus.

The author referred to the harbor officially called Cobh as Queenstown, the name given it by the occupying British. It seemed he was favoring the Empire's cause.

Except, that is probably more your reviewer's paranoia. Later in the book he would note some possible skullduggery by the Admiralty.

On Page 183 he gives an account of the failure of to provide support for the liner as it approached Ireland. There are lapses and incompetencies in wartime and that may have been all that it was. Or it may have been a bit more sinister, as leaving in the lurch a ship that carried not only passengers, but valuable military cargo.

Larson notes that in a letter Churchill had sent to the head of the Board of Trade, hoping for shipping along the coasts, he wrote, “For our part we want the traffic-the more the better; and if it gets in some trouble, better still.” Was Winston hoping for a disaster?

The captain, William Thomas Turner was born to go to sea. He knew his trade and did his best to sail the ship safely and was at his post until nothing else could be done. If anyone was not to blame, it was him. No matter, Churchill relentlessly tried to pin the blame on him.

World War II may have been his finest hour, but World War I, when you add in Gallipoli, was not a great four years for Winston.

Larson's book is not all about the politics and military policy. He takes you from before the ship sails, to the boarding to cast off and on to the ocean all the way to the fatal encounter with the German submarine. The author goes with you on the sub, U-20 to feel the primitive conditions of what was high tech back then.

Shipboard life is not scanted and it is almost as if we are traveling with them. Passenger Gertrude Adams wrote of it, “There were so many on ship that it really was like living in a town. One saw fresh people every day & never knew who they were.”

There were many interesting voyagers, not the least Theodate Pope and her platonic traveling companion, Edwin Friend. They were both leading lights in American Spiritualism. Pope would survive. Her friend was not so lucky and she would have nightmares of searching for him. She never found him but her spiritualist set claimed to have been visited by him on occasion.

Larson's bio says he is a journalist and not a historian. Dead Wake is an entertaining read, but a student of history would have no reason to scorn it.