Copyright: Against Self-Righteousness

It's so cute the way many writers get all fuschia-faced over the subject of copyright, over their property, their God-given Natural Law right to the exclusive use of their ideas, their effort, their talent. I mean, your writing is your property, you own it, just as your house is your property and your favorite blouse and your car and your cellphone and childhood stuffed animal and all the rest.

Right stick, wrong end. Copyright is an interesting example of the evolution of a very practical license into a right. Anyone here mind if we wuote the U.S. Constitution on the subject of Congressional power to issue patents and copyright?:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries

Guys - that's where our Sacred Right originates - even in terms of the U.S. Constitution, which is fairly generous in assuming the independent basis of many rights. The Government will grant and protect temporarily an exclusive license to authors and inventors get to use their stuff exclusively only an an incentive to create and discover, not because there is any "natural" right to an abstraction like the way a given set of words is arranged. Of course now that there are photographic and recording devices, in what Benjamin called the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the same thing applies to the plastic and musical arts.

Okay, wrong end. Why the right stick? Well, consider the very interesting evolution (if I have this right) of a forthright affirmation of the inalienable rights of "life, liberty, and property" into the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Consider also that one of the responses to Tom Paine's historical analysis in Common Sense of the rise of the actual lines claiming the British throne and the "divine right" to rule noted in a melancholy fashion, that if we were to think like that, the foundations of property may equally come into question.

Exactly. "Property of" is not some sort of apriori condition - it's a government patent - an affirmation of call and a promise to protect, for the practical advancement of society. It's simply been around for so much longer than intellectual property rights that property "rights" seem natural, beyond question, fundamental, and occasion great fury and self-righteousness when violated - as intellectual property begins to do for people who have it. So, why not permit this evolution? Becuase we then lose sight of what the authority, established less thna 250 years ago was meant to do. Well, also, I have to admit to an allergy to hysterical copyright rhetoric too.

Example: the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act can be be called an act of theft from the community in one case; and a lie in another. It extends the copyrights of works created decades ago - almost exclusively to benefit corporate-owned intellectual "property", and, above all on behalf of Disney. Read the line from the Constitution again - you cannot encourage the production of a piece of intellectual property by retroactively extending the term of protection. The Supreme Court decided this aspect wasn't actually unconstitutional. While I appreciate the judicial restraint in refusing to invalidate an properly passed law for which you can provide at least some kind of argument (e.g. that allowing companies with intellectual property to retain more of the potential profit from works with expiring copyrights makes more capital available for subsequent productions), the whole legislative history makes it clear that this was simply the transfer of public "rights" into private hands at the cost of a few lobbyist fees and campaign contributions.

And the lie? That even for work not created at the time of the bill - that anyone creates work for the monetary profit it may bring to their heirs 49 years after their death. Even the roughly immortal corporations (including reverse mitosis in the difinition and the purchase of intellectual copyright from the creditors of the bankrupt) don't have a profit horizon that extends nearly that far into the future. In fact, I'd argue that this consequence of the act was just an inadvertant side-effect of trying to secure things the corporations want to hold on to NOW; they don't know how to value whatever their creating now in terms of future worth. It's just a lie to say the extension act promotes the progress of the arts, the constitutional reason this license exists.

Heirs? Hey, look at Stephen Joyce, current heir to the estate of James Joyce - basically a parasitic, obstructionist asshole who is keeping work form being created by threatening lawsuits anytime someone wants to DO something with some of the central works of the 20th Century. Do you think Ulysses was written for him, or that new Ulysses are being created by the incentive to pass money and control down two generations? I can just imagine the heirs of Lorris suing Meung (or perhaps challeging him to a conbat d'honneur) for daring to extend The Romance of the Rose.

Okay, enough here. Think I'll talk about getting credit in the next entry, unless my dearly beloved commenters - named and anonymous - tell me Jesus Christ, move on already.