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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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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.