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We Were Smarter About Copyright Law 100 Years Ago
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."
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
- Thomas McCauley on copyright, 1841.
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100 years ago, we did not have the technology to replicate information as we do now. Hence there was little public demand to be able to do so. Today it is different. A law so rejected by the people is doomed to failure (Prohibition in America in the 1920s anyone?). Copyright law if far too draconian - so much so that many people violate it without realizing it, and many others deliberately do so out of apathy.
Excuse for why is your room always messy?
No, the reason you never heard of the all-too-real Andrew Galambos' absolutarian IP concepts is because he had his lecture attendees sign an NDA! Would Galambos compromise his principles by giving away his startling revelations or permitting the great unwashed unrecompensed access to his revolutionary concepts? NAY!
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.
Are you saying that the Soviet Union didn't produce good movies? There are a lot of big-name American and foreign filmmakers who would disagree with you.
When I studied filmmaking, they divided the world into before and after Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Eisenstein (although by now Eisenstein has become a cliche). Eisenstein was invited to Hollywood (there's a famous picture of Eisenstein shaking hands with Micky Mouse at the Walt Disney studio), and Hollywood filmmakers deliberately set out to learn as much as they could from Eisenstein. The Soviet filmmakers were universally admired. I saw a lot of Soviet movies at the Museum of Modern Art. Don't forget, this is the land of Chekov.
Eisenstein's fortune was that (1) Lenin thought that film was a new and powerful medium that could be used to convince the masses to join in their collective struggle, and the Soviet Union put a lot of resources into it and (2) he was a favorite of Stalin, who also gave him pretty much a free hand. If you found favor with the dictator, you could be pretty creative in the USSR.
The Soviets were pretty good in all the visual arts. Do a Google Image search for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism Malevich or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Lissitzky Lissitsky. And of course they were brilliant musicians.
The great creative flourishing of Soviet art came to an unfortunate end with Stalin, but the Soviet cinema was still pretty good at least until the end of the war.
Nobody knows how Communism would have turned out if it had a more benevolent dictator than Stalin.
The great thing about the Soviet Union was that they didn't believe in copyrights or patents for most of their existence. They flooded the world with books and phonograph records cheap enough to be affordable in the third world, which an army of translators converted into every language of the world. They had good science books. There were physics courses at Columbia University that used Soviet textbooks.
If the Soviet Union were still around, and continued those patent policies, we would have the entire classical music canon in great performances in the public domain.
But the one thing the Soviets did brilliantly was make good movies.
It's a troll. Thomas McCaulay's speech was effective and the amendments to the law under consideration were adopted. The era of endless copyrights didn't begin until 1976 and we are only now realizing what damage it's done. The various copyright extension acts also retroactively protect works already produced - which could not in any way serve the "promote progress" goal.
Oh, and Thomas MaCaulay was a Brit was speaking in the British House of Commons about a British law. He was renowned for his eloquent and thoughtful speeches. He later traveled, wrote the History of England and other works, was made Baron Macaulay and eventually of course, died.
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