Mark Lyn­der­say

At the heart of all the re­cent fuss about copy­right in Car­ni­val is mon­ey. Who's mak­ing it, who's al­low­ing ac­cess and where the heck, re­al­ly, is my cut.

Copy­right is a mod­ern in­ven­tion, an at­tempt to make it pos­si­ble for the fruits of the mind to ben­e­fit from pop­u­lar ap­peal in a world of broad­cast­ing and mass dis­tri­b­u­tion.

It's one of the great ironies of mod­ern copy­right is­sues that it's the ac­cel­er­a­tion of mod­ern me­dia dis­tri­b­u­tion, at a rate unimag­in­able in the era of Guten­berg, that's caus­ing the prob­lems of to­day.

Mod­ern copy­right isn't a sin­gle right, it's now mul­ti­ple op­por­tu­ni­ties bun­dled in­to a sin­gle cre­ation and some­times a myr­i­ad of rights clear­ances with­in an ex­ist­ing prop­er­ty.

A movie is a good ex­am­ple of a cre­ation with mul­ti­ple au­thors and many li­cens­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges. From the screen­play, to the ac­tors' like­ness­es, to the blis­ter-packed toys, there are con­tracts aplen­ty in every 90 minute ac­tion ad­ven­ture.

Now it looks as if the event that likes to call it­self the great­est show on Earth, is as­pir­ing to the le­gal spi­der­webs of the mod­ern block­buster film even as its ac­tu­al con­tent strug­gles to muster the au­di­ence of a straight-to-DVD no-bud­get pro­duc­tion.

From the first rum­blings of in­come cu­rios­i­ty among the glit­tered faith­ful to the fear, un­cer­tain­ty and doubt be­ing ag­gres­sive­ly sown by Richard Corn­wall of the T&T Copy­right Col­lec­tions Or­ga­ni­za­tion, Car­ni­val in 2013 col­lec­tive­ly demon­strat­ed an ad­mirable yearn­ing to po­lice emp­ty sta­bles. Per­haps some band­leader, in­spired by this year's many point­less rights de­ba­cles, will play The Augean Wuk in 2014.

Rights in an in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty (IP) can be sliced thin­ly, but this year we saw blunt three-canals, not Mu­ra­masa swords in play and let's not say any­thing about the spas­tic blades­man­ship.

It isn't clear where we go from here. The lev­el of com­pre­hen­sion of copy­right is at an ab­solute nadir, pro­vid­ing rich fod­der for the kind of un­in­formed and high­ly opin­ion­at­ed ar­gu­ments that have mi­grat­ed so neat­ly from lo­cal rumshops to Face­book.

Our IP it­self is com­pro­mised, with our mas and mu­sic now in three neat phas­es, dra­mat­ic and as­pir­ing, be­feath­ered and per­spir­ing and tra­di­tion­al­ist while ex­pir­ing.

It's ex­act­ly when Car­ni­val needs more in­formed re­view of the prac­tice and prin­ci­ples that it's built on that the chill­ing ef­fects of the du­bi­ous 1995-era tax on Car­ni­val sou­venir mag­a­zines is hav­ing its most dele­te­ri­ous im­pact.

That fee urged such pub­li­ca­tions to a prof­it-dri­ven, 15-year, im­ages-on­ly fo­cus on pret­ty bands that's mar­gin­alised every­thing that hasn't got a thong or 150 beats per minute.

I've had my in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty in­fringed in the past and re­act­ed poor­ly as well. It was on­ly when I be­gan look­ing at what peo­ple were in­ter­est­ed in that I be­gan to re­alise that there re­al­ly is a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence be­tween price and val­ue.

With a sur­pris­ing con­sis­ten­cy, what peo­ple are in­ter­est­ed in us­ing from my archives, ei­ther by ask­ing or out­right theft, are rarely the things that cost the most when they were pro­duced, it's those el­e­ments of Car­ni­val in which con­sid­er­able per­son­al­i­ty and au­then­tic­i­ty were in­vest­ed.

The best thing about the rights in­vest­ed in IP is that they don't have to be ex­er­cised to be re­tained. You can al­low some­one to make use of some­thing, with­in care­ful­ly cir­cum­scribed lim­its, with­out sur­ren­der­ing your own­er­ship of it.

But do­ing that means mak­ing an in­vest­ment in the in­tel­lect half of IP, and we've on­ly been will­ing to ar­gue about the prop­er­ty bits, like mad­dened chil­dren play­ing a Car­ni­val ver­sion of Mo­nop­oly.

Read an ex­pand­ed ver­sion of this col­umn here (http://ow.ly/adAll).