I think there's some major confusion of what copyright means going on here. If the works of Mozart or Beethoven were still under copyright to their heirs, those works would not have disappeared - just that 25 cents of every Beethoven CD sold would be going to the Beethoven family, and that if you wanted to re-record Beethoven's 9th, you'd have to pay the Beethoven family a licensing fee. So CDs would cost $15.25 instead of $15. Whoop-de-doo. And if you pissed off the Beethoven family, you wouldn't be able to re-record the 9th, no matter how much cash you tossed their direction.
Within Copyright law there exist several reasonable use clauses that allow for "infringements" otherwise excluded. You can, for editorial purposes, depict copyrighted material (such as the Coca Cola logo) even if it leads to an unflattering association. You can incorporate existing works into new works so long as you can demonstrate that the incorporation was a subordinate part of the new work, and not the substance of the new work, and that the purpose of the incorporation was to comment on or otherwise respond or react to the original work (Satire being a prime example). |