|
Feb
29
|
Posted by Christopher Waldrop
February 29, 2008 |
|
Copyright laws perform a valuable service, but do they also go too far? And do companies with deep pockets crack down too hard on consumers who violate copyright laws? I’m not going to pretend there are simple answers here. In the March 2008 issue of Wired, contributing editor Frank Rose has a point in his article Dear Hollywood Studios: If You Hold Digital Downloads Hostage, The Pirates Win. The headache the entertainment industry is having with piracy on sites like YouTube makes the recent writers’ strike look like a hangnail. And it’s worth noting, by the way, that the strike was about more compensation for online viewing. It seems like technology has been ahead of the law ever since the invention of the printing press. After all, the Statute of Anne, Britain’s first copyright law, which gave authors rather than printers the rights to profit from their work, was passed in 1710, or about 270 years after Gutenberg put the first press into operation. While plagiarism is still a concern in academic circles, big industries are more worried about piracy. In the literary world the Google Book Search raised concerns for both writers and publishers, with some for and some against. On the one side some publishers and authors were concerned about copyright infringement; on the other some publishes and authors realized they could potentially reach a wider readership. Books that were out of print but still protected by copyright could become available.
Speaking for myself, I think both sides have strong arguments in their favor. On the one side, I understand that consumers want convenience, and once the technological genie is out of the bottle it can’t be put back. Various media industries are fighting a losing battle in trying to control exactly how content is distributed. On the other side, though, I think writers, musicians, painters, and other artists deserve to be paid for their work, and they deserve control over their work–although I also believe in limits, but more about that later. Just to give one example, the cartoonist Bill Watterson, who gave us Calvin And Hobbes, retired and has refused to market his comic strip in any way other than the Calvin And Hobbes books. Given that he could make a fortune selling the rights to put his characters on everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs and even collect royalties from those decals you see on pickup trucks, he’s shown incredible integrity. It’s hard not to respect his wishes, although clearly there are a lot who don’t. And this raises a thorny issue. Ultimately there is no law that can make people behave responsibly and treat others with respect. I’m not saying there’s no point in maintaining copyright laws; in fact, I think that, while copyright laws run counter to freedom of speech, any freedom must be used responsibly. Copyright laws are a mechanism for guaranteeing artists the right to benefit from and control their work.
At the same time I think it’s a dangerous precedent that copyright laws are being increasingly extended. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added another twenty years to copyright protections, extending them to the life of the producer plus seventy years, or, in the case of works produced by corporations, ninety-five years. It was the Disney Corporation’s way of keeping Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain, and, as lawyer Chris Sprigman explains in a commentary for FindLaw, keeping work out of the public domain can be harmful for artists, although it’s good for corporations. Science fiction writer Spider Robinson made a similar point in his short story Melancholy Elephants, which argues against extending copyright protection to infinity–something I’m pretty sure has been proposed in the real world as well as in fiction. There are no easy answers, though. The existence of both copyright protections and the public domain (works that are no longer protected by copyright) are both beneficial. We just have to tread carefully because even public domain works aren’t necessarily free for the taking. Melville House Press has issued a whole series of short works as The Art of the Novella. Including works by Robert Louis Stevenson (died 1894), Fyodor Dostoevsk
y (died 1881), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (died 1930), the works are all public domain. That doesn’t mean these editions are free for the taking (or scanning), though. A lot of expense and work by editors at Melville House Press went into producing and distributing these particular editions, and, in the case of works in Russian or French, the translations into English were done by contemporary translators, like Charlotte Mandel, who translated Guy de Maupassant’s (died 1893) The Horla. Translation may be a labor of love, but that doesn’t mean translators give up all rights to the work they’ve done just because the original is public domain.
My head is spinning and I haven’t even started dealing with fair use, which allows for republication of
some part of an author’s work with attribution. Without fair use critics couldn’t quote from a book in a review, and fair use law also allows for parody, although some companies and individuals have pushed back against parody. The 1995 book Lo’s Diary, by Pia Pera, is a retelling of Nabokov’s Lolita from her perspective. The Nabokov estate sued for copyright infringement. They settled out of court, but it raises the question, how much is protected? I’ve purposely titled articles in this series as an allusion to Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book. Having admitted that, am I open to charges of copyright infringement? And images of book covers (like the ones that appear on this blog) are, in theory, allowed by fair use law. Publishers obviously know the value of judging a book by its cover, but if they came after me, could I defend myself? Or, facing an expensive legal battle, would it be better to let it go, possibly setting a dangerous precedent for others?
Here’s an obscure but, to me, extremely interesting example of how, sometimes, the same words can take on wholly different meanings, depending on context. In the first paragraph of his work Les Chants de Maldoror, the Comte de Lautreamont plagiarized a passage from a natural history book about cranes. In the original text it was a description of actual cranes; in Lautreamont’s hands the cranes are a metaphor. It’s the same language but completely different uses. Is that parody? Protected by fair use? Or something else entirely? Maybe it qualifies as part of the found poetry genre, but isn’t that just an artistic excuse for plagiarism?
Comments
