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retrospective of someone’s career and meaningfully illustrate it with lots of media from that person’s career. You’d build in a cost as the producer of one of these things. You’d build in a cost of paying X dollars to the talent that performed. But it would be a known cost. That’s the thing that trips everybody up and makes this kind of product hard to get off the ground. If you knew I have a hundred minutes of film in this product and it’s going to cost me X, then you build your budget around it, and you can get investments and everything else that you need to produce it. But if you say, “Oh, I want a hundred minutes of something and I have no idea what it’s going to cost me, and a certain number of people are going to hold me up for money,” then it becomes difficult to put one of these things together.
Alben worked for a big company. His company was backed by some of the richest investors in the world. He therefore had authority and access that the average Web designer would not have. So if it took him a year, how long would it take someone else? And how much creativity is never made just because the costs of clearing the rights are so high? These costs are the burdens of a kind of regulation. Put on a Republican hat for a moment, and get angry for a bit. The government defines the scope of these rights, and the scope defined determines how much it’s going to cost to negotiate them. (Remember the idea that land runs to the heavens, and imagine the pilot purchasing flythrough rights as he negotiates to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco.) These rights might well have once made sense; but as circumstances change, they make no sense at all. Or at least, a well-trained, regulationminimizing Republican should look at the rights and ask, “Does this still make sense?” I’ve seen the flash of recognition when people get this point, but only a few times. The first was at a conference of federal judges in California. The judges were gathered to discuss the emerging topic of cyber-law. I was asked to be on the panel. Harvey Saferstein, a well-respected lawyer 104 FREE CULTURE
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