Free Culture | Page 9

publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both.
Before the technologies of the Internet, this conflation didn't matter all that much. The technologies of publishing were expensive; that meant the vast majority of publishing was commercial. Commercial entities could bear the burden of the law--even the burden of the Byzantine complexity that copyright law has become. It was just one more expense of doing business.
But with the birth of the Internet, this natural limit to the reach of the law has disappeared. The law controls not just the creativity of commercial creators but effectively that of anyone. Although that expansion would not matter much if copyright law regulated only "copying," when the law regulates as broadly and obscurely as it does, the extension matters a lot. The burden of this law now vastly outweighs any original benefit--certainly as it affects noncommercial creativity, and increasingly as it affects commercial creativity as well. Thus, as we'll see more clearly in the chapters below, the law's role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain industries against competition. Just at the time digital technology could unleash an extraordinary range of commercial and noncommercial creativity, the law burdens this creativity with insanely complex and vague rules and with the threat of obscenely severe penalties. We may be seeing, as Richard Florida writes, the "Rise of the Creative Class."4 Unfortunately, we are also seeing an extraordinary rise of regulation of this creative class.
These burdens make no sense in our tradition. We should begin by understanding that tradition a bit more and by placing in their proper context the current battles about behavior labeled "piracy."


CHAPTER ONE: Creators
In 1928, a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called Plane Crazy. In November, in New York City's Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, Steamboat Willie brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse.
Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie The Jazz Singer. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would win an audience. But when Disney ran a test in the summer of 1928, the results were unambiguous. As Disney describes that first experiment,
A couple of my boys could read music, and one of them could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture.
The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronization was pretty close.
The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!1
Disney's then partner, and one of animation's most extraordinary talents, Ub Iwerks, put it more strongly: "I have never been so thrilled in my life. Nothing since has ever equaled it."
Disney had created something very new, based upon something relatively new. Synchronized sound brought life to a form of creativity that had rarely--except in Disney's hands--been anything more than filler for other films. Throughout animation's early history, it was Disney's invention that set the standard that others struggled to match. And quite often, Disney's great genius, his spark of creativity, was built upon the work of others.
This much is familiar. What you might not know is that 1928 also marks another important transition. In that year, a comic (as opposed to cartoon) genius created his last independently produced silent film. That genius was Buster Keaton. The film was Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Keaton was born into a vaudeville family in 1895. In the era of silent film, he had mastered using broad physical comedy as a way to spark uncontrollable laughter from his audience. Steamboat Bill, Jr. was a classic of this form, famous among film buffs for its incredible stunts. The film was classic Keaton--wildly popular and among the best of its genre.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. appeared before Disney's cartoon Steamboat Willie. The coincidence of titles is not coincidental. Steamboat Willie is a direct cartoon parody of Steamboat Bill,2 and both are built upon a common song as a source. It is not just from the invention of synchronized sound in The Jazz Singer that