Multinational Monitor: You argue that expanded copyright protection is harming cultural production and expressive life. Why?

Bill Ivey: [...] To me, copyright has become too long and too wide … For example, back in the fall of 2004, a federal court decided that even a tiny amount of musical material couldn’t be used in a new work without securing a license from the original copyright owner. The specifics of the case involved rap and hip-hop recordings sampling elements of earlier performances. But the implications are very broad, affecting any artist involved in what would be called collage art-making, whether clipping images out of magazines to make a new work of art, or assembling old film clips into a new documentary. So today there’s no minimal use; every little snippet of someone else’s intellectual property has to be licensed. We’ve got a very locked-up system when it comes to creating new art out of old …”

[...] “MM: Besides copyright, you raise concerns about corporate gatekeepers in the cultural marketplace. What do you mean by the idea of gatekeepers?

Ivey: Culture appears to exist everywhere and seems to be readily available, but it really comes to consumers through a complicated system. And that system contains toll booths and exhibits places where the gates are narrow and places where the gates are really wide. A healthy cultural system is one in which artists can find their way in and one in which their work can be widely disseminated. It’s also a system in which consumers have broad access to lots of work by lots of different kinds of artists. What we find today, in a market-dominated cultural system, is that there are corporate gatekeepers who not only affect how much art gets through to consumers, but also shape the very character of the creative process …” From Arts, Inc: The Corporate Control of Culture - An Interview with Bill Ivey by Multinational Monitor.

Bill Ivey is the former chair of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, a federal cultural agency. He is the author of Arts, Inc: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (2008). Ivey serves as director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, an arts policy research center with offices in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. He also directs the Center’s program for senior government, the Arts Industries Policy Forum.