A little bit of googling tells me that others had the same reaction as I did (feel free to Google it yourself, but here's a good one) but as usual, I put it better. And I put it in Alt-QAnon terms. This is really important because it's an-easy-to-understand example of how our country (and indeed much of the world) has been controlled for a very long time not by child molesting satanists, but by powerful real entities that are sociopathic and immortal and care even less about the public interest than child-molesting satanists.
The Dr. Seuss issue du jour is the fact that six of his books -- with publication dates going back to 1937 -- have images in them that are offensive to certain members of certain ethnic groups, and not necessarily just those depicted. Suddenly, Seuss Enterprises -- the WRAITH that has been profiting off of the copyrights in these books since Dr. Suess's death 30 years ago in 1991-- is shocked, shocked to find those images and is now withdrawing the books from publication.
I'm not here to judge that particular decision or to take sides in the debate over political correctness that it has re-ignited. I'm just here to point out how ridiculous it is that we got here in the first place, and also to use it as irrefutable evidence in support of Alt-QAnon: A clear example of how WRAITHs dictate public policy in ways that suit their needs, not ours.
The first U.S. Copyright Act (of 1790) provided protection to maps, charts and books for a period of 14 years from recordation, plus the right to renew for an additional 14 years. In other words, 28 and done in some cases; 14 and done in the rest. The founders, in their wisdom, thought the prospect of a 28-year monopoly was enough to motivate learned people to put pen to paper and produce maps, charts, and books for the edification of humankind: the creators get 28 years of monopoly profits from their labor, but after that, the price of their work falls to the cost of production -- like everything else in a functioning capitalistic, free-market society.
Note also the wisdom of the renewal provision: the popularity of any publication will be highest at publication and will rapidly fade, and it would often not be worth the author's time and trouble to even bother renewing a copyright to receive the second 14 years. As a result, most copyrighted works would naturally fall into the public domain after the first 14-year term.
And back then, as now, a book whose copyright had any significant value after 28 years was the one-in-a-million exception, not the rule. So nobody -- I mean NOBODY -- decided NOT to write a book or make a map or a chart on the basis that 28 years was not long enough.
So why is it that again and again since then, any time Congress considered the appropriate length of a copyright term, it made the term even longer, such that Dr. Seuss's 1937 book will still be under monopoly protection for another decade? If copyright was truly a bargain with creators on behalf of the public -- a 28-year monopoly as motivation to create work -- then shouldn't the terms have gotten shorter, as population, markets, and wealth expanded, thereby vastly increasing the "value" of the temporary monopoly? Would authors really have refused to write books knowing they would only get, say, 10 years of protection, while also knowing that in those ten years, their books could be marketed to hundreds of millions of people, the world over?
Alt-QAnon explains it easily. It was the "wish" of the WRAITHs (wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hives) -- corporations and political parties -- that have been in control of this country since late in the Nineteenth Century. Corporations -- in recent times most notably Disney -- that owned a few valuable copyrights have lobbied hard for copyright term extensions that would extend their huge passive income streams by decades. And members of both political parties eagerly accepted the paltry bribes since their true constituents -- corporations and trade associations -- either were giving the bribes or didn't care.
This culminated in the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended copyrights to 70 years from the death of the author, or 95 years for a work for hire, and extended the term for subsisting copyrights (like Dr. Seuss's) to 95 years (when it was originally obtained in 1937, it had a term of 28 years plus a 28 year renewal period, so would have expired in 1993).
You might have heard that Congress enacted the extension to "harmonize" US law with those of other countries. That was a purported rationale, but there was no requirement to harmonize the law retroactively. But beyond that, the reason the other countries had expanded their copyright terms to ridiculous lengths (and abolished the renewal term before we did), was just because the WRAITHs over there (including some of the same WRAITHs as here) were able to accomplish it there first. That's one of their tricks -- get something enacted overseas, and then come back here and tell our Congress that we need to do the same, in the name of harmonization.
And where was the Supreme Court during all this? Led by Justice Ginsburg -- who, incidentally, despite her many fine qualities was, during her time on the high bench, a leading shill for the pro-copyright WRAITHs in numerous cases -- they upheld the Copyright Term Extension Act on the basis that Congress could "rationally" have thought that copyright term extension was a good thing, because, for example, it would motivate owners of decaying films to restore them.
Justice Ginsburg also trampled over the Petitioners' first amendment argument, by claiming that since Copyright itself is an "engine of free expression" and has built-in accommodations for free speech (e.g. fair use and the idea-expression dichotomy), copyright legislation like this does not cause first amendment problems. In other words, even though the Act uniformly extended the terms of subsisting copyrights by 20 years, it was still perfectly fine under the first amendment.
Let's take a minute to think about that as we return to Dr. Seuss. Without the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, Dr. Seuss's "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street" would have fallen into the public domain in 2012. At that point in time, people would have been absolutely free to republish it, sell posters or t-shirts with its pictures, or make derivative works like musicals or movies out of it. But with the Copyright Term Extension Act, nobody except Seuss Enterprises gets to do that until 2032. When you multiply that across all of the millions of works whose copyrights were extended by the CTEA, you can see that massive amounts of speech that would otherwise have been permissible was simply impermissible, thanks to the CTEA.
But, you might say, the first amendment says that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." And the CTEA clearly "abridged" the right of just about everybody to use Dr. Seuss's copyrighted works when the copyrights were set to expire, didn't it? That was not a first amendment violation, according to the Notorious RBG and the majority of the rest of the Supreme Court, since copyright and the first amendment serve the same basic purposes.
Justice Ginsburg later doubled down on this shockingly unthinking first amendment analysis in Golan v. Holder, where she found the first amendment equally irrelevant on the question of whether Congress could "restore" copyright protection to works that had fallen into the public domain.
Aside: This is essentially the same court that has, somewhat bizarrely, recently extended its first amendment jurisprudence to find a first amendment right in trademarks that either disparage ethnic or racial groups or else are simply offensive (e.g. use the f-word). In other words, in those cases the Supreme Court was solicitous of first amendment interests where there truly shouldn't have been any -- trademarks are supposed to indicate the source of goods, not be a platform for expression; any "statement" made by a trademark only beclouds the source-indicating purpose of the mark; if anything, allowing trademarks on the basis of "free speech" suppresses more speech than it promotes, since the holders of those trademarks can then use them to inhibit the speech of others.
But back to the main point here: As Alt-QAnon explains, the WRAITHs saw to it that copyright terms were extended, with the effect that the public's speech was vastly suppressed, for a period of 20 years. In the case of Dr. Seuss, this whole controversy simply wouldn't have arisen -- the books would have been in the public domain, and would presumably have been published by multiple generic publishers, and available for free download on the internet, and no single entity would be able to control whether or not the public gets to even buy them.
It seems pretty obvious that such a scenario would better serve the free speech interests that the copyright system (according to the Notorious RBG) supposedly promotes: as with other racist or offensive speech that first amendment jurisprudence goes out of its way to tolerate, these books would end up in the marketplace, where they would be in competition with more modern, less racist, less offensive books, and where the "marketplace of ideas" is already doing a pretty good job of teaching the next generation that racism is wrong.
In fact, the books -- like other books of their time as well as previous times (Huckleberry Finn, for example) -- are extremely valuable in demonstrating to all of us how far we have come. The fact that the books are offensive is exactly what makes them interesting, and why they should be free to all to examine and consider, and, if people are so inclined, to Bowdlerize or use as anti-racism teaching tools. It is only the bizarre fact of WRAITH-induced excessive copyright term extensions that these books -- which have far outlived their relevance as books for children and are valuable for historical and instructive interests only -- are now essentially banned, as a result of the desire of a WRAITH -- Seuss Enterprises -- not to offend, and thus to sell more Dr. Seuss books.
The last sentence of the preceding paragraph is yet more evidence of Alt-QAnon. Seuss Enterprises is a WRAITH that has found itself in control of a very lucrative publishing monopoly -- the ability to publish and profit from the books of a revered children's author. For a WRAITH like Seuss Enterprises, pandering to the voices of political correctness was a no-brainer. There was a real possibility that continuing to publish those books would have tarnished the Dr. Seuss brand, and it might even have resulted in boycotts of all of Seuss Enterprises' books. So the right thing to do -- according to the profit maximizing algorithm that drives decisionmaking in WRAITHs -- was to stop publishing the offending titles, with great fanfare.
Like I said, I'm not going to weigh in on the controversy itself. I do understand that the images are offensive to modern sensibilities, perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes, and that a child of one ethnicity reared solely on the basis of such images might well end up having stereotypical attitudes toward people of certain other ethnicities. And children of the certain other ethnicities, seeing only such images, might development inferiority -- or at least "otherness" -- complexes.
I'm just hoping that those who support Suess Enterprises' decision don't take the next step and start supporting unlimited copyright term extensions. That would be playing into Alt-QAnon and the WRAITHs' hands, big time.
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