Imagine a case in which all the documents were in Bulgarian, and the judge would not admit that he needed a translator. In that case, one might expect misadventures similar to those which happen when American jurists venture on artistic subjects. English is a compulsory subject in an American high school. Art, Music, and Dance are not. Such instruction as there is, practically ceases at about the third grade. The result is that people like lawyers have no background to interpret art, music, or dance.

These copyright cases seem to involve things which, considered as works of art, are very trivial. Cases involve ring-tones, not the extent to which one symphony may be derivative of another. A work of literature, or a work of art, demands something from the reader or the viewer, or listener, as the case may be. Things which are highly marketable tend to be “cheap thrills,” which don’t demand much of anything from the consumer.

Last night, I walked down to the corner store, and there was a young man picking out a Halloween costume for his two-year-old son. He settled on a Darth Vader costume, which I presume was properly licensed, and all. But here is the problem: The Darth Vader head starts with a 1940 Wehrmacht standard-issue coal-scuttle helmet, combined with a fairly generic gas mask, both painted black. George Lucas wanted to make two fairly concrete points about Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker, that he was Regular Army, and that he couldn’t breathe the air which everyone else breathed, and he pulled down two standard cliches for the purpose. Of course there was the conventional displacement from the American army to the German army. I don’t think any sensible person would call Star Wars a serious movie– it begs too many political, economic, and technological questions. As a serious work, it would not be considered in the same league as Apocalypse Now, or even the little-known TV-movie Weekend War.

To clarify, “tp” is in Tampere, whcih is in Finland, and we are speaking of Ameican copyright law. The rejection of “sweat of the brow” is not of course the only restriction on copyright. There have been some cases involving fictional works about factual incidents, and court decisions have held that copyright could only apply to those aspects of the fictional works which departed from the facts, and this would presumably also apply to previous public-domain works. Consulting a dictionary of English slang, dated 1981, I find that “banana” has a well-established sexual meaning, and this dictates positioning the banana so that part of it forms a “codpiece.” When you pull out the elements of the banana costume which can be shown to be either ancient or widespread, there is essentially nothing left. A one-liner joke only works because everyone already know it. There is the story about the two stage comedians who used the same joke-book, and could amuse each-other by reciting page numbers.

Incidentally, I went through a list of what I consider good movies, trying to see if any of them had “merchandise.” About the only one which did was Anne of Green Gables. This has becone a cult book/film for Japanese girls, who have the kind of stressful relations with their mothers which American girls have not had for a hundred years. So a Japanese girl buys hersef a wig of red hair with pigtails.