Is Copyright In Danger?
A recent debate/poll in The Economist ended with a tally of 71% to 29% declaring that copyright laws do more harm than good. While I’m the first to admit that there are serious problems with the existing handling of intellectual property, I’m appalled at the seemingly widespread notion that creativity should not be legally protected and encouraged.
Last year, only the $700 Billion bailout distracted the House of Representatives from passing the Orphan Works Act, which would have crippled copyright protection for individuals in the United States by invalidating the copyright of any work if the author could not be contacted. Well, I don’t know Dan Brown’s phone number, so I might as well start publishing copies of Angels and Demons now that the movie is out and demand is high. The Orphan Works Act is gone for now, but it died only after passing the Senate. A similar bill could be produced at any time.
I do not actually subscribe to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, as regular readers should know. My guiding principle of government comes from Abraham Lincoln: the role of government is to do those things which ought be done but which cannot be done or done so well by private effort. Rand’s thesis was that the only legitimate role for government is the defense of the nation and of property.
But she and I are eye to eye on one point: the idea people are the drivers of this world. I give more credit than she does to labor, but the idea is the prime mover of human advancement. The pyramids in Egypt exist because someone had a vision for their construction and made it happen. It couldn’t have happened without the thousands of slaves that were forced to do the labor, but that in itself says it: given the choice, most of those thousands would have rather stayed home. We can be grateful that the world has progressed to a point where epic undertakings are (usually) done with voluntary labor which shares in the profit of such endeavor, but should not forget that the execution of a project cannot occur without a prior spark of creative vision.
One of the tasks of government (Congress, actually) enumerated by the United States Constitution is «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.» This makes sense. After a certain amount of time it seems counterproductive to permit someone to forbid others the use of her or his own ideas — where would we be if we had to pay royalties to the heirs of the inventor of the wheel? — but without the exclusive rights to an idea it becomes dangerous to share the fruits of that idea. Publishing companies could republish the works of authors with no obligation to reward those authors. It would actually be a liability to pay an author to produce a novel and be the first to publish it. Having to pay the author would mean a higher price, and subsequent editions could therefore be printed and sold for a lower price by every other publisher.
The definition of «a limited time» has changed since the Constitution was ratified in 1788. Copyright has gone from a maximum of 28 years to a maximum of 56 years to fifty years past the death of the author. Any work prior to 1998 automatically had copyright extended an additional 20 years. How does copyright protection extended this far promote the progress of science and useful arts? It doesn’t. In fact, such excessive limits to exclusive rights probably hinder progress, since the heirs of successful inventors and authors have little motivation provided by society to follow in the footsteps of their progenitors.
The right to control our own ideas is fundamentally an inalienable right: it cannot be taken away by force. All one needs do to keep an idea exclusive is not tell anyone about it. The legal concept of intellectual property encourages us to tell others about our ideas by guaranteeing us the same exclusivity even after we show our ideas to the world. As an inalienable right, it should not be transferable or assignable. One should be able to say their work should be free to all, but not to say that the rights of authorship fall upon their children.
Practically of course, copyright thus limited would still benefit heirs of authors. The term of a copyright should not terminate on the author’s death. We should not provide incentive to kill an author simply to get an important idea into the public domain. But the moral rights should not be transferable. 56 years is a generous period of time for an author to retain exclusive control.
Nonetheless, to say that on balance the need for reform nullifies the benefit of the protection of an author’s exclusive right is to say that the potential works of children of inventors is more important than the actual work of inventors. This is unless you consider any copyright protection to be harmful because it can stifle (for a limited time) derivative works. To that I say you’ve got to have something in the first place in order to make something else from it.
The people who would dismantle copyright and patent law entirely, are the people that looked like evil caricatures in Ayn Rand’s books. They are the ones who assign no value to the creative spark and recognize only the effort of executing a planned idea. This is disingenuous considering that they want to use the ideas that others hatched — otherwise why bother to eliminate copyright?
A more recent adjunct to the open-source or free software movement is a favorite of those who want to eliminate copyright: it is the Creative Commons license. It is actually a set of licenses that has been thoughtfully put together to declare an author’s explicit permission to waive some or all rights to his or her own work. Even the most restrictive of these licenses permits distribution of full and complete versions of an author’s work, provided that attribution is given.
This is all well and good, and I have great respect for the Creative Commons license as well as the organization that develops (and continues to develop) it. The fact that the people that want to do away with copyright love Creative Commons says much more about those people than it does about Creative Commons. The Creative Commons licenses are appropriate for a wide variety of work, including some with commercial resale value. I’ve considered attaching one of the Creative Commons licenses to Monochromatic Outlook (none of the licenses appear to provide explicit permission for reusing fragments only, probably because that is usually permissible under the «fair use» provision in copyright law.) But let’s be clear about this: the Creative Commons license would not be possible if it weren’t for the existence of copyright law. One can only waive rights and enforce rights if one has those rights to begin with. Scrap copyright law and a Creative Commons license would be meaningless, because anyone could do anything with… anything.
Perhaps it is only my vanity that gives me the idea that my work is worth controlling and leveraging for my own benefit, but I am certain that other people’s work is worth preserving and encouraging. If I have overvalued my own ideas, let me discover that the hard way. Don’t tell me that ideas intrinsically have no value, because that’s a great way to convince me not to share even the existence of an idea with you.
Please join me in supporting reasonable intellectual property law reform, not the wholesale abolition of intellectual property laws.
