Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

Lawrence Lessig

8 thoughts on “Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere”

  1. Focusing on the “commercial value” of copyright fundamentally misses the point. Copyright is a human right. It’s about a person being able to benefit and control their own work (their labor, their original ideas and contributions).

    Any creative work can suddenly become commercially (or culturally) valuable. A previously “unvaluable” work can be exploited by the right set of circumstances and have tremendous value (for example, what Disney did with fairy tales or what someone might do with a movie produced from an unknown book).

    Beyond money, artists should be allowed (at least during their lifetimes) the ability to creatively control their own work. For example, not letting your characters be used to sell products you don’t believe in.

    There’s a sub-current of the creative commons movement that seems to think that works that aren’t making money should just be abandoned and anyone should be able to exploit them. I would almost argue the opposite, which is works that are clearly making lots of money and are big elements of popular culture (like Marvel comic characters) should be subject to even lower standards of “fair use” (like fan fiction). And I would think there should be a higher standard (at least morally) of acknowledging the creators (and estates) of works that are less known.

  2. The purpose of copyright and patents is to provide an incentive for artist and inventors to create work that enriches the culture. Copyright should therefore be limited to the life of the author.

  3. I have no problem with the creators of a work having copyright over that work. What I disagree with is that large corporations can demand that copyright in exchange for bringing the work to the public. Corporations should be compensated for their contribution to the development of a work, but they should NOT own the copyright to it. Clearly an invention that was developed /by/ the corporation would be owned by the corporation, as it is now, but artistic works that are essentially created through a solo effort, should not be tradeable.

  4. Copyrights never developed in East Asia, even though the output of printed books in China was much higher than in Europe until fairly recently, I’ve seen estimates as late as 1850, but the numbers are obscure. Arguably, the earliest novels were fictionalized Chinese histories such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Literacy in China was always high. Marco Polo noted that even beggars could read in China. This may have something to do with the lax attitude toward IP in China today.

    I draw an analogy between traditional Chinese block print books and ebooks. Chinese printing was low-tech. Write out your book on thin paper, paste it on a wood block and carve out around the characters. That started around 200 CE, perhaps earlier. The straight strokes of Chinese characters are easier to carve than western letters and evolved to be easier to carve as the centuries rolled on.

    Although it was invented, moveable type never made it in traditional China, probably because block printing was easy, efficient, and cheap. No fancy metal type and printing press, just some guy who could handle a carving tool and somebody to smear on the ink and smooth the page on the block. I have heard that carving a block took less time and skill than type-setting a page and block printing was faster than a hand fed press. The blocks were stored and printed on demand. Often a copy at a time. The blocks were stored suspended from racks in open buildings with roofs but no walls. A library was a collection of printing blocks, not books.

    An author was someone who wrote something and hired someone to carve printing blocks. Not a big capital or high skill deal at all. Small business owners were known to write books and have blocks carved. Printing was not a monopoly a publishing industry, like ebooks are not a monopoly of publishers.

    If authors could control the copying of their master files, they might be in the same position as traditional Chinese authors who controlled when a copy was made from their blocks.

    Find a copy of T.H. Tsien’s on Written on Bamboo and Silk if you are interested in the early history of printing.

  5. The idea of copyrights being for the life of the author only is fundamentally flawed. If a person writes a book on her deathbed, does her husband/do her children have no right to benefit from that? Does she face losing complete control over her work, perhaps having her family devastated by seeing it used for purposes to which she strongly objected in life?

    Should those of us over 65 stop creating because we may only live a few more years, so how much benefit can we and our families derive? What about someone with a terminal or potentially fatal condition?

    The purpose of copyright is not just to encourage us to create, any more than the purpose of real estate property rights is solely to encourage us to invest in the economy. I don’t hear anyone declaring that they should inherit no property, no house, no savings account from parents or even spouses.

    While I accept that some limit on copyright duration has to be imposed just to be reasonable–and for the culture, I suppose–I simply do not understand the belief that those of us who work so hard, often without pay, are just tools of society, to be cast aside upon our deaths and our work plundered by those who haven’t lifted a finger to support or encourage us.

    It is our families–or those close friends or institutions we choose as heirs–who support and encourage us. It is only fair that my husband of 38 years will inherit my copyrights if I die first. Those who argue otherwise should be prepared to have their life’s accomplishments and savings confiscated “for the public good” when they die.

    Guess you could say I feel strongly about this.

    • I’m not really sure how A book can be used for something the author objects to, though I suppose it comes back to that thorny issue of the Book as art versus the book as commercial product.
      There is also, I think, and erroneous assumption that once creative work is out of copyright, The creator can no longer make money from it. The idea seems to be that consumers will buy things at the lowest possible price, which is false.

      • An obvious example of a copyright work being used for something NOT agreed to by the creator is when Dr. Seuss’s statement that “a person’s a person no matter how small” was prominently used in anti-abortion advertising. I can’t recall whether he was still alive or whether it was his estate that objected, but this is a clear example of how someone’s work can be used for a social or political purpose that they did not endorse and might (I have no specific information on his views) oppose.

        And while it is true that an author (or other creator) might still profit from a work out of copyright, remember that the new covers we pay for, along with the formatting and editing, would also not be protected. So we’d be risking a lot of work that could simply be swiped by others. It’s hard enough trying to earn an income and stave off the pirates NOW.

        Also, if I may add, I wish everyone (not necessarily any of you, fellow posters) who endorses the idea that our creations should serve society rather than ourselves could have visited so-called communist countries, as I did, before the Berlin wall and all it symbolized came down. A very sad way to live when people lost their motivation to work hard. I won’t belabor the point here, but I doubt any of you would have enjoyed living in, say, Poland before Solidarity.

    • “I don’t hear anyone declaring that they should inherit no property, no house, no savings account from parents or even spouses.”

      Plenty of people declare that *others* should inherit no property. 🙂

      The Death Tax debates are alive and well.

Comments are closed.