copyright: moral right or outdated convention
Ray Dillinger
bear at sonic.net
Wed Jan 17 09:10:54 PST 2001
In the internet world, no publishers are needed - or if they are
needed, it will only be as manufacturers of a physical commodity
(bound printed pages) that people like better than what they can
roll off their own printers. And in fact, you find publishers
living this way now -- I can still get recent printings of Mary
Shelley's book _Frankenstein_, or Melville's _The Whale_, even
though the copyrights on them are long gone. So somebody out there
is making a profit manufacturing bound volumes of public-domain
words. There's no reason the whole industry can't work that way.
A long time before there was copyright law, as it is now understood,
there was literature.
When Virgil sat down to write about what the Gods had been up to
lately, he didn't have to worry about who owned the characters;
the characters were clearly in the public domain. (He did have
to worry about what the priests would think, though - the practice
of stoning heretics was well-established).
But anyway, from the greeks forward, you get plays and works composed
by many different authors, drawing upon characters and storylines
and situations that had been dreamed up by earlier authors. In
Italy, characters like Scaramouche and Pantaloon emerged, and the
entire Commedia Del Arte coalesced around them - written by dozens
of different people, none of whom had to ask the others for any
kind of permission. In Germany, new stories were written about
old characters like Tyll Eulenspeigel, each author developing
something about the character that other authors had left out.
And these people, acting in defiance of the principles that would
later be enshrined as copyright law, created powerful, thoughtful
literature. How did this happen?
First, there were _Patrons_. I use the word not in the sense of a
movie watcher or theatre watcher today, but in the sense of its
coinage. At the time, a _Patron_ was someone who would underwrite
the living expenses of an acting troupe or an author, in exchange
for the right to have first access to any new work or new performance.
Sculptors and Painters also had their _Patrons_, but in those cases
the works were non-copyable and the _Patron_ simply wound up owning
it. Today we would call such things "works for hire", or simply say
that the _Patron_ had bought it and paid in advance. But in the case
of the acting troupes or the authors, the work the _Patron_ paid for
would eventually be enjoyed by everyone. You still find such people
today, teaming up to support local ballet companies and theatre
groups. Considering that the incremental cost of copying bits is
very near zero, I suppose that several _Patrons_ could easily
support an author working on his next book, and then simply hand it
off to public domain when it was finished. With very few exceptions,
the artist isn't going to get rich, but as someone who's seen
publishing contracts, that doesn't really make a difference. With
very few exceptions, the artists don't get rich now.
The second reason such powerful literature was produced without the
benefit of copyright, was because the characters themselves became
Archetypes. Each was formed not by a single quirky hand, but by
hundreds of authors scattered by thousands of miles and many years.
Innovations in an established character were either greeted with
delight or shouted down, depending on whether they appealed to an
audience's perception of the character. And each author was free
to develop new facets of the characters that hadn't been developed
before. Thus we see Scaramouche, in hundreds of plays, as the
jester, the prankster, the happy-go-lucky ne'er-do-well. But we
also see him, a couple of times, as an old man, experiencing
regrets, and as a sincere lover, striving to redeem himself, and
so on... These outlier plays, which would never have been dreamed
up by the original author (whoever that might be) of Scaramouche,
develop facets of the character that are a vital part of the whole.
Without copyrights, characters and stories are free to grow beyond
the vision of the artists who created them.
I don't think copyright is still necessary. It existed for the
sole reason of making new ideas profitable so that someone could
afford to publish them. But publishing new ideas is effectively
free now, so it's become obsolete. And our literature is sadly
missing some of the things that copyrights destroyed.
Bear
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list