» Saturday, 18 December A.D. 2010
quotes from moral panics and the copyright wars
I recently finished Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars by William Patry and found it to be quite good. If you've read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, the books are quite similar; Patry's book is slightly more technical than Lessig's, but has less of the obvious heart that Free Culture exudes. Patry devotes a significant chunk of his book to unpacking the rhetoric of the copyright wars (just because piracy has been used to describe copyright breakers for two hundred years doesn't mean that we are not emotionally affected by the description, for instance, or that why describing the things involved as intellectual property elicits particular judgements about the parties involved); his analysis of the metaphors involved in describing the origins of copyright--and why those metaphors don't work very well--is particularly good. I found several of the quotes in the book to be right on the money, and I provide them for your enjoyment below.
Copyright and trademark are not matters of strong moral principle. Intellectual property regimes are economic legislation based on policy decisions that assign rights based on assessments of what legal rules will produce the greatest economic good for society as a whole.
Sarl Louis Feraud Intl' vs. Viewfinder, Inc., 2nd Circuit 2007
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures. I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty, I willingly submit even to this sever and burdensome tax. Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown that by so doing I should proportionally increase the bounty. My complaint is, that my honourable and learned friend doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely and perceptible addition to the bounty.
...It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
--Lord Thomas Macaulay
We should be trying to hone the system so that the greatest rewards and encouragement go to those industries which need and deserve them the most. Where IP rights perform their function of advancing the science or arts, they should be encouraged to do so. Where or to the extent that they do not, they have no justification and the normal disciple of competition should apply. The gluttony which has resulted in the growth of of completely unnecessary or excessively long IP rights undermines the system itself.
--Sir Hugh Laddie
It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of the compiler's labor may be used by others without compensation. As Justice Brennan has correctly observed, however, this is not “some unforseen byproduct of a statutory scheme.”...It is, rather, “the essence of copyright,”...and a constitutional requirement. The primary goal of copyright is not to reward authors, but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”
--Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company
Not surprisingly, then, the metaphor of authors as parents of their works was not first put forth by authors, but instead by London book publishers in the eighteenth century, at the dawn of modern copyright, to justify their assertion of perpetual commodity rights in authors' works. As commodities, those works were acquired by book publishers from authors for as little money as possible (and sometimes no money). The invocation of the metaphor was thus the beard for publishers' economic objectives. From the beginning of modern copyright, we see one of the central rhetorical features of copyright discourse--authors put forth as the basis for and beneficiaries of rights that are in truth owned by publishers and other corporations who regard authors as a negative item on balance sheets to be reduced as much as possible.
posted by Nate @ 5:33PM