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calimacUrsula K. Le Guin has expanded on her resignation from the Authors Guild over the Google copyright settlement.
I don't know the details of the settlement; I have neither a compelling need nor a particular interest right now in delving into that. My presumptive sympathies are with UKL, but she was wrong on the facts in the SFWA/Scribd file takedown case, so who knows.
I do know something about copyright, though, and the copyright wars distress me, because more and more we're being pushed simultaneously towards two, mutually exclusive, unsupportable libertarian utopias of what copyright should be.
One is the electronic file-sharers dream in which copyright disappears, "information wants to be free," you take whatever you want, and writers earn their living ... some other way, either unspecified or unlikely.
The other is the lengthening and strengthening of copyright, at the extreme case making it permanent, and enforcing it with a punitive rigor that makes the carved exceptions, like parody and fair-use quoting, seem like inexplicable isolations.
The first vision is unnecessary. Freedom of information, even if ultimately uncontrollable, may still be regulated. We have libel laws; we should be able to have copyright laws. And while copyright includes control over the where, when, and how of publication, it's primarily about assuring revenue to the author. In a microtransaction environment, that shouldn't be impossible to handle.
The second vision, however, is worse: it's pernicious. Its proponents seem to envisage, with pleasure, a privatization of the entire information commons. All writers are in dialogue with their colleagues and predecessors; without a free commons to move around in and cite or allude to, discourse becomes impossible, because this sort of copyright isn't about revenue, it's about control of ideas.
The current maniacal enforcement of plagiarism laws, which draws no distinction between genuine theft and insufficiently rigorous citation, where you almost have to put a citation footnote on the word "the" if any writer has ever used it before, is an aspect of this. But the main culprit is Mickey Mouse. It was the imminent expiration of his copyright that prompted the recent grotesque expansions of terms, because the Mouse was the first really popular fictional character to have been created and owned by a corporation rather than an individual writer. And corporations, unlike individuals, need not ever die. Which only goes to show the evil of giving corporations the rights of human beings, but I digress.
(Worth noting, too, that Disney largely made its reputation on retellings and elaborations of folk tales, mining in the information commons. Had they their way, they wouldn't have been able to do that today.)
All of this is inimical from what copyright was intended to be. The term "intellectual property" is a bad one, because copyright isn't a property law at all. It's an artificial monopoly, intended as an ad hoc method to provide payment and moral control to authors.
As I understand it, prior to the establishment of copyright laws in England in the early 18th century, such a notion was unconceived of. A copy of a book was a physical object, belonging to whoever owned it. But there was nothing to stop any licensed printer from printing up more copies and selling them.
In such an environment, as on the wild web of today, putting a control on the right to reproduce must have seemed perverse. But eventually it was done, and authors received a monopoly on their works for a limited period, at first a few years, and eventually and justly their whole life, plus a minimum period afterwards to their heirs. Besides allowing authors to engage in enforceable exclusive contracts for the release of their works, copyright at its best also enforced moral rights, the right not to have your work mutilated without your consent. (This proved useful when ABC mangled and made unfunny some Monty Python episodes without the Pythons' consent.) Control over the works was strong, but over derivative works was weak.
And that's how I'd like it to remain. Dracula the Un-Dead, the recent sequel, was actually conceived by Ian Holt, the co-author, as a way in which, by virtue of its being a new book, some control over the Dracula character could be returned to the Stoker family, assuming he could find a member willing to collaborate with him; eventually Dacre Stoker agreed. This should be as quaint a notion as anything in Dracula itself. 97 years after the author's death and 112 after original publication, the rights to Dracula shouldn't belong to Stoker's distant collateral descendants any more than to anybody else. Or any less, either, but Dacre Stoker's legal rights over the sequel shouldn't be enhanced by the fact that his distant ancestor wrote a similar book. What happens to fictional characters that have gone into public domain may be horrifying - there's a study called The Case of Peter Rabbit which traces a gruesome story - but who should control this? And who's to say that the original author of Snow White, even if there is such an identifiable person and whenever that person may have lived, wouldn't have looked on the Disney film as an abomination?
I don't know the details of the settlement; I have neither a compelling need nor a particular interest right now in delving into that. My presumptive sympathies are with UKL, but she was wrong on the facts in the SFWA/Scribd file takedown case, so who knows.
I do know something about copyright, though, and the copyright wars distress me, because more and more we're being pushed simultaneously towards two, mutually exclusive, unsupportable libertarian utopias of what copyright should be.
One is the electronic file-sharers dream in which copyright disappears, "information wants to be free," you take whatever you want, and writers earn their living ... some other way, either unspecified or unlikely.
The other is the lengthening and strengthening of copyright, at the extreme case making it permanent, and enforcing it with a punitive rigor that makes the carved exceptions, like parody and fair-use quoting, seem like inexplicable isolations.
The first vision is unnecessary. Freedom of information, even if ultimately uncontrollable, may still be regulated. We have libel laws; we should be able to have copyright laws. And while copyright includes control over the where, when, and how of publication, it's primarily about assuring revenue to the author. In a microtransaction environment, that shouldn't be impossible to handle.
The second vision, however, is worse: it's pernicious. Its proponents seem to envisage, with pleasure, a privatization of the entire information commons. All writers are in dialogue with their colleagues and predecessors; without a free commons to move around in and cite or allude to, discourse becomes impossible, because this sort of copyright isn't about revenue, it's about control of ideas.
The current maniacal enforcement of plagiarism laws, which draws no distinction between genuine theft and insufficiently rigorous citation, where you almost have to put a citation footnote on the word "the" if any writer has ever used it before, is an aspect of this. But the main culprit is Mickey Mouse. It was the imminent expiration of his copyright that prompted the recent grotesque expansions of terms, because the Mouse was the first really popular fictional character to have been created and owned by a corporation rather than an individual writer. And corporations, unlike individuals, need not ever die. Which only goes to show the evil of giving corporations the rights of human beings, but I digress.
(Worth noting, too, that Disney largely made its reputation on retellings and elaborations of folk tales, mining in the information commons. Had they their way, they wouldn't have been able to do that today.)
All of this is inimical from what copyright was intended to be. The term "intellectual property" is a bad one, because copyright isn't a property law at all. It's an artificial monopoly, intended as an ad hoc method to provide payment and moral control to authors.
As I understand it, prior to the establishment of copyright laws in England in the early 18th century, such a notion was unconceived of. A copy of a book was a physical object, belonging to whoever owned it. But there was nothing to stop any licensed printer from printing up more copies and selling them.
In such an environment, as on the wild web of today, putting a control on the right to reproduce must have seemed perverse. But eventually it was done, and authors received a monopoly on their works for a limited period, at first a few years, and eventually and justly their whole life, plus a minimum period afterwards to their heirs. Besides allowing authors to engage in enforceable exclusive contracts for the release of their works, copyright at its best also enforced moral rights, the right not to have your work mutilated without your consent. (This proved useful when ABC mangled and made unfunny some Monty Python episodes without the Pythons' consent.) Control over the works was strong, but over derivative works was weak.
And that's how I'd like it to remain. Dracula the Un-Dead, the recent sequel, was actually conceived by Ian Holt, the co-author, as a way in which, by virtue of its being a new book, some control over the Dracula character could be returned to the Stoker family, assuming he could find a member willing to collaborate with him; eventually Dacre Stoker agreed. This should be as quaint a notion as anything in Dracula itself. 97 years after the author's death and 112 after original publication, the rights to Dracula shouldn't belong to Stoker's distant collateral descendants any more than to anybody else. Or any less, either, but Dacre Stoker's legal rights over the sequel shouldn't be enhanced by the fact that his distant ancestor wrote a similar book. What happens to fictional characters that have gone into public domain may be horrifying - there's a study called The Case of Peter Rabbit which traces a gruesome story - but who should control this? And who's to say that the original author of Snow White, even if there is such an identifiable person and whenever that person may have lived, wouldn't have looked on the Disney film as an abomination?
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Because we can
Date: 2010-01-09 09:15 am (UTC)Writing itself is a technology. The Egyptian Book of the Dead was about how to prepare a body for the next life, but it also ascribed authorship. These were dead people talking to you. A major paradigm shift. Later, authorship was imposed after the fact, eg ascribing the Pentateuch to Moses or writing gospels in the name of a saint.
Writers made their money by performing. Homer (or whoever) performed his poetry; Shakespeare performed his plays.
The printing press affixed the spoken word to a physical object in a way that papyrus and clay tablets couldn't. Finally, the spoken word and the written word could diverge in a commercially viable form. This wasn't true for performances until the early 20th century with the rise of audio recording and movies.
Which is where the mouse comes in. Your observation that "the Mouse was the first really popular fictional character to have been created and owned by a corporation rather than an individual writer" is not entirely true; I would give that honor to Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character, or perhaps Mary Pickford. Still, I don't think it's a coincidence at all that the economics of creativity changed when the technology changed.
And that's what's happening now. At Minicon in the 80s and 90, we held panels on "Intellectual property in the digital age: It's all just ones and zeros". We came to no useful conclusions, iirc, and I don't have a good answer even now. The economics are tricky. Bruce Schneier keeps arguing for basically continuing the same system we have now, but rely more on small increments. If I understand his approach (or simply paraphrasing): we can still sell books/movies/music individually. Most people will be happy to pay a reasonable price. Don't worry too much about pirating, since it costs more to Unsuccessfully stop pirates than it does to let a few assholes spend lots of time instead of giving you money.
This is a bit of a digression into an interest of mine. I don't know the issues Le Guin is objecting to.
As to your last couple of paragraphs: The exact opposite is happening. The folk process has come to copyrighted works. We have parodies and mash ups and fan fic. Sometimes the original author gets something out of the deal; usually not. Other people's creative efforts are background radiation we can't avoid and try to live with in our own way.
But that's a different essay.
Re: Because we can
Date: 2010-01-09 10:25 am (UTC)I'm not sure who owned or owns the Little Tramp, Chaplin or his studio. What I do know is that the Tramp has entered the intellectual commons, i.e. is used by others with an only implicit credit, in a way nobody would dare to do with Mickey Mouse. Either the owner is unusually generous, unlikely for a corporation, or there no longer is an owner.
"The exact opposite is happening." No, both are happening at the same time. It's possible that what I describe is a reaction to what you describe, but I don't see authorial distaste of fan-fiction expressing itself in the form of concern over copyright control of the work itself, which is what Le Guin is talking about here, even when it comes from the same person.
Fan-fiction, which can be a gentle homage, has become in practice more of a species of swarming parasite that quickly, if attended to, turns any popular new creative work moth-eaten, and is likewise a different essay.
Re: Because we can
Date: 2010-01-09 02:14 pm (UTC)I don't know who owns The Little Tramps, though studios and Chaplin fought over the movies. To my knowledge, no one tried to trademark the character because no one thought of it. (The flip side being that clown faces are registered.) Disney desperately wanted Steamboat Willie to remain in copyright to protect the image not the script. The ancillary marketing was worth much more than the rights to the movie itself.
Control over the works was strong, but over derivative works was weak. and later I don't see authorial distaste of fan-fiction expressing itself in the form of concern over copyright control of the work itself
I take your point, but the beginning of the end was a long time ago. I think "attempted control over the works was strong" would be better. Paramount was coming down on Star Trek conventions from the beginning; Leonard Nimoy more-or-less invented charging speaker's fees at fan-run cons. Babylon 5 took early web fan sites to court (or threatened to) if they used images posted on the B5 web site. The images were cgi, and (they claimed) if they lost control online then they would lose control of the tv show.
I've read startlingly little fan fic and am not an authority, but it does seem to have taken over many fan's lives far more than the originals ever did. These people feel ownership of the characters, background and situations. How is that different than painting Mickey Mouse on the wall of your child's room?
Sounds like a panel. Or five.
Re: Because we can
Date: 2010-01-09 03:52 pm (UTC)"I take your point," you say, but I'm not sure I made clear what I meant by "Control over the works was strong." Trekcons, B5 websites, and fanfic are what I was calling derivative works in that sentence. The works are the shows themselves. When you say "lose control of the tv show" that sounds like a trademark issue, not a copyright issue (trademark law works quite differently from copyright), unless they mean "lose control of its image and perception in viewers' minds," and brother, any author loses control over that the minute they publish.
The difference you ask about is that, after painting Mickey Mouse on the wall of your child's room, you don't normally put a picture of it on a fan web site. To that, Disney would object. Many authors who loathe fanfic make clear that what readers do in private for their own amusement is their own business. Extremely limited print distribution is iffy at best, but it's publishing it, which web posting amounts to, to which they strongly object.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 03:09 pm (UTC)Which works for people like musicians who have made it (concert revenue etc) but doesn't do jack for people who produce work in other media.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-10 01:51 am (UTC)First, comparing encasing works in copyright to Bradbury's "firemen" is wild to the point of offensiveness. It's like comparing Tay-Sachs disease to the Holocaust.
The idea that these poor, defenseless works are just desperately waiting for their copyright to run out so that a thousand royalty-free editions will bloom, and that otherwise they'll all just die! die into the dust! is ludicrous.
Worst of all is the claim that "Clearly, the incentive of 28 + 28 years was enough to encourage him to write the book and the publisher to publish it. The evidence is that.. it happened." Since that copyright term is all that was available at the time, this is structurally identical to a capitalist's claim that starvation wages and no benefits in a company town are sufficient payment to workers because they take the jobs.
As long as the author is inventing sob stories, how about a one in which Ray Bradbury, the author he picked - who is still alive and fairly hale and needing an income at the age of 89 - watches all the works that earned him his fame slowly pass beyond the public domain line within his own lifetime, denying him his rightful income from the sweat of his brow?
If the copyright term is too long now after several iterations of reform, prior to the reform sequence starting 30 years ago it was too short, and this scenario happened all the time to long-lived authors, and they didn't even have to be very young when they published the works in question. (Bradbury turned 33 the year F451 came out.)
And authors complained about this bitterly, nonwithstanding the fact that, as this author imagines it, their only protest should have consisted of going on strike and publishing nothing at all! I'm sorry, this is a stupid argument.