We Were Smarter About Copyright Law 100 Years Ago 152
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle has a blog post comparing the recording industry's arguments in 1909 to those of 2009, with some lovely Google book links to the originals. Favorite quote: 'Many and numerous classes of public benefactors continue ceaselessly to pour forth their flood of useful ideas, adding to the common stock of knowledge. No one regards it as immoral or unethical to use these ideas and their authors do not suffer themselves to be paraded by sordid interests before legislative committees uttering bombastic speeches about their rights and representing themselves as the objects of "theft" and "piracy."' Industry flaks were more impressive 100 years ago. In that debate the recording industry was the upstart, battling the entrenched power of the publishers of musical scores. Also check out the cameo appearance by John Philip Sousa, comparing sound recordings to slavery. Ironically, among the subjects mentioned as clearly not the subject of property rights were business methods and seed varieties." Boyle concludes: "...one looks back at these transcripts and compares them to today's hearings — with vacuous rantings from celebrities and the bloviation of bad economics and worse legal theory from one industry representative after another — it is hard not to feel a sense of nostalgia. In 1900, it appears, we were better at understanding that copyright was a law that regulated technology, a law with constitutional restraints, that property rights were not absolute and that the public would not automatically be served by extending rights out to infinity."
Was Copyright or Technology Better Understood? (Score:2, Interesting)
Another explanation might be the failure of practicing fully communal societies like the U.S.S.R. Back then it could have been construed as possible for art to flourish with everything in the public domain. After watching the few movies that came out of communist countries, I think it definitely inhibits the production of quality art. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing for either extreme. I'm just saying that there's a happy medium and we're gravitating away from that.
Re:They don't even go back far enough. (Score:5, Interesting)
You were not able to break copyright rules around 1900 by accident. You don't copy a book without being pretty deliberate about it, and you certainly don't give copies of a book away for free.
So in 1900 it was a fair assumption that copyright breach of any scale to speak of was commercial by nature. Today, that argument is no longer true. So stiff legal punishment was way more in place in 1900 than it is today.
Re:They don't even go back far enough. (Score:1, Interesting)
Even more radical, Victor Hugo wrote in 1878 (yeah, a bit later; but the'yre from the same generation: Hugo was born just 2 years later than Macaulay):
Before the publication, the author has an unquestionable and unlimited right. But once the work has been published, the author is not its master anymore. It is then the other one who seizes it. Call him the name you want: human mind, public domain, society. This character is the one who says: "I'm here, I take this work, I do what I believe I have to do with it, I, human mind ; I own it, it is now mine".
Re:They don't even go back far enough. (Score:1, Interesting)
Your presumption of harm (Score:2, Interesting)
Your presumption that the violation of copyright in some way guarantees harm done to the holder of the copyright is an interesting and novel economic theory. Have you got a citation you would like to share?
Get rid of copyright... (Score:3, Interesting)
I like living in an era of computing and modern medicine. I don't feel nostaligic for a time when you were likely to die before you hit 40. I think we should probably abolish copyright altogether, but we could at least start by limiting it to 5 years. If the "artist" or creator can't perform their work sufficiently well to compete with others performing it (ie much better) they don't deserve the revenue. The argument that nothing new would be created is pure fud.
Most people can own and operate a camera but will still hire a professional photographer (and mosti will not the cheapest one) to shoot their wedding. Professional photography isn't dead. We haven't had to artificially regulate it. There will always be room for people to be paid to do something well, or at least well as judged by the populace.
Subject (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever happened to Winnie the Pooh in Canada? I remember a big deal was made of the fact that Canadian copyright expires 50 years after the death of the author, which would put Winnie in the Canadian PD sometime in 2006, but I never heard anything after the fact.
I ask because even 50 years seems like an insane amount of time to cling to a copyright, but here in America (land of the free corporate overlords) we're looking at upwards of 120 years on some things. If I want to find PD samples to use in songs I have to scrape together what I can find from what few recordings even existed at the time. The original intent of copyright has been so thoroughly corrupted that there's little or no resemblance to what it was supposed to represent.
Re:They don't even go back far enough. (Score:2, Interesting)
No. You should read the article I linked. It's very long, but it's a good read.
There already was a copyright law, and it allowed 14 years [wikipedia.org] - a term which was considered reasonable and which has been determined to be optimal [arstechnica.com]. The law he was arguing against proposed the life of the author plus 25 years. It was modified to conform to his recommendation of a longer than 14 but finite and predictable length of 42 years from publication, no extensions, no consideration for the longevity of the author. It was made law in England, and then by treaty in most of the rest of the world, and remained the law until 1976 (over 130 years).
It was only until 1976, and more regrettably 1998 [wikipedia.org] that the law he was arguing against was adopted in the US.
Under the current law works published in 1923 will not expire from copyright until 2019 at the earliest, or much later in others. It's reasonable to expect that copyright will be extended yet again before this date, and so on in perpetuity, rendering copyright essentially eternal. This so defeats the social contract of copyright, so defeats the stated purpose of the "promotion of progress" and is so obviously an unfair law that people simply will not comply with it. Since they're already getting in the habit of breaking the copyright law, the don't bother with subtle niceties like discriminating between ebooks of 1984 [slashdot.org] and a prerelease movie [torrentfreak.com].
And so... the outcome he warned against was avoided in his lifetime. He did a good service to his nation and the world. Because we've ignored his warning we find ourselves in our current state. That's what make this thread "done in one".