The Vagaries of Copyright

I think we shall discuss something serious today – intellectual property.

You may have noticed the rather large eye in the upper right corner of the blog. It’s not Big Brother watching you. It’s me. It’s my actual eye, as well as my figurative one, and it’s looking out at the world all the time.

If you’ve read my “About Me” or know me, you know I’m a lawyer by training. Intellectual property protection is a huge issue with me – it was even before law school (since high school, I’ve always worked in a thinking field where the only “product” was what came out of my head) but that natural inclination was strengthened by a semester in Professor Speta’s IP class (hooray Northwestern!) lo these many years ago.

I feel very strongly that a person who creates something with their brain has as much right to protect that creation as someone who creates something with their hands. Intellectual property law supports this theory, from copyright to trademark to Napster case law.** I’ve held this position in a fairly no-exceptions, no-nonsense way for years. I firmly believe that every author (or other intellectual property creator) has the right to keep people from using or reproducing or profiting from their works without their express permission (and, optimally, some form of compensation – be it monetary or recognition-ary). I’ve had an issue with this in the past when I found a post or two of mine on other random blog lists (the full post, with my personal name but no attribution to my website, no links, and no requests before they reprinted), so I take the concept rather personally. Some writers will disagree with me on this, but I don’t think that just reprinting with my writing name is adequate acknowledgment. I can’t take a full Stephen King story and reprint it on my blog and then put his name at the end, and no one should be able to do that with my writing either.

I read a very interesting article recently on the New York Review of Books blog. It talks about the historic roots of copyright law and the protections it affords authors – and their heirs/estates. It got me thinking about my own position a bit. It raises some issues I hadn’t thought of before – like the purpose of copyright being more than just protection for writers’ creations, but also an incentive to keep the creative process going. Let’s face it – if there was no possibility of getting paid/recovering the personal expenses of writing (largely in the form of forgoing other, gainful, employment while the writing is happening, but also of self-publishing expenses, computers/printers, postage when mailing out letters/copies, etc.), many people likely wouldn’t be able to write. We don’t all expect to make a billion dollars, but it would be nice to make something one day – without copyright, that possibility would be gone. So would the optimistic hope for the future that makes writing a “career” for those of us who haven’t yet sold anything…

But the article also got me thinking about the remuneration issue in a different vein – does the seventy years protection thing really make sense? If I’m 25 when I publish my book and die right away and my family gets royalties for the next sixty-five years, maybe that makes sense. If I’m 95 when I do, and two generations of relatives I’ve never met collect them, maybe it doesn’t. And what about the lottery payment system behind buying books? There’s a tremendous amount of luck and timing involved in making a lot of money selling your book – there’s no correlation at all between the time/effort spent (or the quality of the work) and the remuneration involved. Like so much else in life, monetarily, it’s a bit of a jackpot system. Some people make a fortune for crap, some make nothing for gold. Copyright doesn’t change that.

Still, I guess I feel like an imperfect system is better than none – here, as in so many other places. I’m terribly curious what other people think though, so weigh in please… I promise not to copy your comments. 😉

*FindLaw is a reference I have used professionally and personally; it’s a great source of information.
**HUGE DISCLAIMER: This is a decent looking reference I found online. I am not familiar with the company beyond a brief online search to see if there were glaring objections to it (there don’t appear to be); this link is not offered as advice or endorsement but purely for an overview of the issues that I happened to find quickly online.