Sonny's Boner

I have a certain amount of affection for Sonny Bono: his self-deprecating personality was appealing (I met him once at his restaurant in Palm Springs), I liked Sonny and Cher as recording artists and entertainers, and I was sad when he skied into a tree.

But the other side of Bono, the politician/songwriter who wanted to see copyright extended FOREVER, has done great harm to our culture through the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which passed through Congress in 1998 and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. That guy sucks sphincter.

Illegal Art has a new our compilation project, "Sonny Bono Is Dead":

This act diminished the public's ability to access older works while granting more control to corporations anxious to preserve a few copyrights from the 1920's. Copyright law continues to expand and defeat its original purpose of promoting advances in the arts and sciences. These excesses damage the evolution of our culture and only serve corporate interests.

We encourage artists to liberally sample from works that would have fallen into the Public Domain by the year 2004 had the Sonny Bono Act failed. Artists are also encouraged to create new works by sampling Sonny Bono's output (or other artists who embraced the notion of copyright lasting forever). Please email illegalart@detritus.net to receive updates on this project and additional instructions on participating.

This project will be released as part of our theme-based compilation series (past projects include Deconstructing Beck, Extracted Celluloid, and Commercial Ad Hoc, with others smaller open-submission projects being presented on the web and on the compilation Bricolage #1). Although we generally only release audio CDs, we remain open to other media. We'd particularly be interested in appropriations of the Mickey Mouse character who should have gone into the Public Domain in 2004.

Peruse this list of songs that whose copyrights would have expired without the Bono Act:

Anything copyrighted from 1923-1928 should have entered the Public Domain by the year 2004. A great list of works has been researched by ASU law professor Dennis S. Karjala and can be found on his Subverted Public Domain List. We have added the following recordings for later years. Feel free to send us further additions.
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Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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