The Rights of Rights

Trademarking allows for a company to have sole branding rights to that which it markets its commercial product; copyrighting allows for individuals and companies to maintain exclusive rights to the wording of an idea or image. These rights do not last forever; they come with limits. Some, as our articles demonstrate, believe this legal entitlement leads to a monopoly of sorts over specific words and images unfairly, keeping it out of the culture's legal reach. Others believe that it's their work, and so they should be able to manipulate and guide what their work is associated with and how. In general, I think that after death, you should lose the rights, and your estate (others who were not the creators) should not be able to keep those rights for extensive or undetermined amounts of time. But, then examples like Disney and Elvis arise. As a fan of both, I believe in the purity of their images and agree that their companies and/or estates should be able to look out for the interests of those images, even after Disney and Elvis has died, or Mickey Mouse's trademark expired. Unfortunately, I don't have a strong legal or moral argument, but rather I am simply distrustful of what "just anyone" could and would do to the images that Disney, Elvis, and the like worked so hard to create. Then again, they were created because of the people's response to them, hence making them more significantly a cultural product than merely an individual's vision and execution of that vision. So, sure a work should not be forever the sole property of a family line, but sometimes I'm grateful that estates can maintain rights for years after the holder's death and that companies can petition for continuances of their copyrights and trademarks to ensure the "safety" of their work.