maxbarry.com
Thu 07
Jul
2016

Misinterpreting Copyright

Writing

I just read “Misinterpreting Copyright” by Richard Stallman, found the points he makes very convincing and am curious about your opinion as an author and someone who writes about piracy, DRM, and such things.

Anon

Stallman is right about everything. It’s just that the logical conclusions he reaches are so uncomfortable, it’s easier to pretend he’s wrong. It’s like PETA. There’s no way what we’re currently doing to animals is moral. But burgers are awesome and you can enjoy them better if PETA is a bunch of hypocritical wackos. So we’re all ears for that narrative.

Stallman is the guy saying, “You know, instead of buying that coffee, you could have given an impoverished third-world child safe drinking water.” You can’t fault the logic. But no-one wants to take it to that extreme. So you never hear people criticizing Stallman’s arguments. Instead, it’s always how he was late to a lecture or dresses badly or was rude to someone once.

So what Stallman is right about this time is that copyright was created for the benefit of readers, not writers. This is a foundational principle of capitalism in general: that the purpose of production is consumption. It’s not to create jobs. Jobs are a side-effect, a byproduct of having more stuff available more cheaply. Ideally, the stuff would be free and unlimited, in which case we wouldn’t need jobs at all. The stuff is the point, not the jobs.

The goal of copyright wasn’t for me to give up my day job selling Unix computer systems and live a luxurious life of working naked from home. That was just a side-effect of a system designed to encourage me to write more books. And frankly I’m not sure how well it’s working. It’s been a while since my last novel. Sure, it’s helpful to have time and freedom for writing, but I found being trapped in a corporate sales job pretty motivating, too. I can’t for 100% certain say that I’m producing more words today than I would if forced to sit under fluorescent lighting in a suit for 8 hours a day and given a laptop and freedom for one hour in the middle. Or threatened with waterboarding. There are lots of ways to incentivize artists, is my point.

But copyright isn’t even about that any more. At first it lasted for 14 years, after which anyone could sell copies, write a spin-off, or adapt the work; now it usually lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, so just forget about doing anything ever unless you buy the rights. That’s not because we think we’ll get more books if dead authors’ estates can get paid in 2116; dead writers can’t write faster, and no-one ever decided whether to write a novel based on their prospects for postmortem royalties. Instead, we have adopted the idea that copyright is a moral thing, which artists deserve. If you make something up, you should be able to control it for the rest of your life, and then some, because it’s yours.

Personally, although I totally get the proprietary instinct (you’ll never treat my kids as well as I do), I think stories are bigger than authors. There’s no doubt to me that if copyright still lasted 14 years, we would be a lot richer for random artists and companies taking James Bond or Superman or Star Wars and doing what they liked. There would be a lot of dreck, yes. But from that hotbed of competition and evolution there would also be some truly great stories.

And copyright today financially benefits companies more than people. The vast majority of writers wouldn’t be affected at all if copyright was radically shortened, because the vast majority of books don’t generate royalties for decades. They do it for a few years, if at all. Only the mega-blockbusters have that kind of tail, and if you’ve produced one of those, you’re not starving. So in practice, the nice idea that artists should enjoy creative control forever translates into a small number of media companies cranking the handles on a couple dozen money-printing machines that no-one else is allowed to touch.

I’m a lot less idealistic than Stallman, though. Of course, everyone is.

Comments

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Simon (#7150)

Posted: 2821 days ago

"copyright today financially benefits companies more than people." -- this has always been the case. In fact, copyright and the whole notion of intellectual property was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a weapon in what historians call "the Battle of the Booksellers". See Mark Rose (1993), "Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright". Also Roger Chartier (1996), "Culture écrite et société. L’ordre des livres (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle)", p.51: “...loin de naître d’une application particulière du droit individuel de propriété, l’affirmation de la propriété littéraire dérive directement de la défense du privilège de libraire qui garantit un droit exclusif sur un titre au libraire qui l'a obtenu.” (“...far from being born from a particular application of individual property rights, the assertion of literary property derives directly from the defence of the bookseller’s privilege that guarantees exclusive rights on a title to the bookseller who obtains it.”)

Simon (#7150)

Posted: 2821 days ago

(p.s. your comments system seems to miscode utf8... sorry about that... I'd rewrite it with html entities, but I can't edit my post...)

towr (#1914)

Location: Netherlands
Posted: 2820 days ago

>> There’s no doubt to me that if copyright still lasted 14 years, we would be a lot richer for random artists
>> and companies taking James Bond or Superman or Star Wars and doing what they liked. There would be a lot of
>> dreck, yes. But from that hotbed of competition and evolution there would also be some truly great stories.

On the one hand, it happens anyway on the internet; fanfics aplenty. Also, rule 34.
And on the other hand, does calling a character "Edward Cullen" or "Christian Grey" really make a damn lot of difference? Other than avoiding copyright infringement. Well, ok, granted there need to be some more differences; after all the "Tanya Grotter" books are deemed a copyright infringement of "Harry Potter".
But I don't really see why carbon-copying universes would be necessary for richer ecosystem of stories. It's also a lot safer not to have to live up to the expectations it brings. I've seen plenty of book-adaptations that were terrible only because they wouldn't just drop the pretense that they still had anything much to do with the book. If they had just gone that extra step of changing the title and character names, they might have passed for decent entertainment.

And as a final note, I think perhaps there's also something to be said for protecting the dignity of fictional characters. Not that copyright is the answer to that. But painting over the Mona Lisa isn't considered ok, so why should character assassination of beloved fictional characters be ok?

towr (#1914)

Location: Netherlands
Posted: 2818 days ago

Finally having read the essay, I can't help but notice that the premise he start with doesn't jive with the rest.
He start off with quoting the US constitution: "[Congress shall have the power] to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts [...]". But then tries to apply this to things that are neither "Science" or "useful Arts" (technology).
Which isn't to say public interest might not be the most important consideration for entertainment or aesthetic arts, but apparently the Founding Father's saw no need to explicitly mention it. But then again, I am not a copyright lawyer, so what do I know.

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