Universe Vol1Num2
Page 63
And, Sir observe that I am not selecting here and there extraordinary instances in order to make up the semblance of a case. I am taking the greatest names of our literature in chronological order. Go to other nations; go to remote ages; you will still find the general rule the same. There was no copyright at Athens or Rome; but the history of the Greek and Latin literature illustrates my argument quite as well as if copyright had existed in ancient times. Of all the plays of Sophocles, the one to which the plan of my noble friend would have given the most scanty recompense would have been that wonderful masterpiece, the Oedipus at Colonos. Who would class together the Speech of Demosthenes against his Guardians, and the Speech for the Crown? My noble friend, indeed, would not class them together. For to the Speech against the Guardians he would give a copyright of near seventy years, and to the incomparable Speech for the Crown a copyright of less than half that length. Go to Rome. My noble friend would give more than twice as long a term to Cicero's juvenile declamation in defence of Roscius Amerinus as to the Second Philippic. Go to France. My noble friend would give a far longer term to Racine's Freres Ennemis than to Athalie, and to Moliere's Etourdi than to Tartuffe. Go to Spain. My noble friend would give a longer term to forgotten works of Cervantes, works which nobody now reads, than to Don Quixote. Go to Germany. According to my noble friend's plan, of all the works of Schiller the Robbers would be the most favoured: of all the works of Goethe, the Sorrows of Werter would be the most favoured. I thank the Committee for listening so kindly to this long enumeration. Gentlemen will perceive, I am sure, that it is not from pedantry that I mention the names of so many books and authors. But just as, in our debates on civil affairs, we constantly draw illustrations from civil history, we must, in a debate about literary property, draw our illustrations from literary history. Now, Sir, I have, I think, shown from literary history that the effect of my noble friend's plan would be to give to crude and imperfect works, to third-rate and fourth-rate works, a great advantage over the highest productions of genius. It is impossible to account for the facts which I have laid before you by attributing them to mere accident. Their number is too great, their character too uniform. We must seek for some other explanation; and we shall easily find one.
It is the law of our nature that the mind shall attain its full power by slow degrees; and this is especially true of the most vigorous minds. Young men, no doubt, have often produced works of great merit; but it would be impossible to name any writer of the first order whose juvenile performances were his best. That all the most valuable books of history, of philology, of physical and metaphysical science, of divinity, of political economy, have been produced by men of mature years will hardly be disputed. The case may not be quite so clear as respects works of the imagination. And yet I know no work of the imagination of the very highest class that was ever, in any age or country, produced by a man under thirty-five. Whatever powers a youth may have received from nature, it is impossible that his taste and judgment can be ripe, that his mind can be richly stored with images, that he can have observed the vicissitudes of life, that he can have studied the nicer shades of character. How, as Marmontel very sensibly said, is a person to paint portraits who has never seen faces? On the whole, I believe that I may, without fear of contradiction, affirm this, that of the good books now extant in the world more than nineteen-twentieths were published after the writers had attained the age of forty. If this be so, it is evident that the plan of my noble friend is framed on a vicious principle. For, while he gives to juvenile productions a very much larger protection than they now enjoy, he does comparatively little for the works of men in the full maturity of their powers, and absolutely nothing for any work which is published during the last three years of the life of the writer. For, by the existing law, the copyright of such a work lasts twenty-eight years from the publication; and my noble friend gives only twenty-five years, to be reckoned from the writer's death.
What I recommend is that the certain term, reckoned from the date of publication, shall be forty-two years instead of twenty-eight years. In this arrangement there is no uncertainty, no inequality. The advantage which I propose to give will be the same to every book. No work will have so long a copyright as my noble friend gives to some books, or so short a copyright as he gives to others. No copyright will last ninety years. No copyright will end in twenty-eight years. To every book published in the course of the last seventeen years of a writer's life I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend gives; and I am confident that no person versed in literary history will deny this,—that in general the most valuable works of an author are published in the course of the last seventeen years of his life. I will rapidly enumerate a few, and but a few, of the great works of English writers to which my plan is more favourable than my noble friend's plan. To Lear, to Macbeth, to Othello, to the Fairy Queen, to the Paradise Lost, to Bacon's Novum Organum and De Augmentis, to Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, to Clarendon's History, to Hume's History, to Gibbon's History, to Smith's Wealth of Nations, to Addison's Spectators, to almost all the great works of Burke, to Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, to Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia, and, with the single exception of Waverley, to all the novels of Sir Walter Scott, I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend gives. Can he match that list? Does not that list contain what England has produced greatest in many various ways—poetry, philosophy, history, eloquence, wit, skilful portraiture of life and manners? I confidently therefore call on the Committee to take my plan in preference to the plan of my noble friend. I have shown that the protection which he proposes to give to letters is unequal, and unequal in the worst way. I have shown that his plan is to give protection to books in inverse proportion to their merit. I shall move when we come to the third clause of the bill to omit the words "twenty-five years," and in a subsequent part of the same clause I shall move to substitute for the words "twenty-eight years" the words "forty-two years." I earnestly hope that the Committee will adopt these amendments; and I feel the firmest conviction that my noble friend's bill, so amended, will confer a great boon on men of letters with the smallest possible inconvenience to the public.
The Gutenberg Column
Author: Michael Hart
THE FIFTH INFORMATION AGE
by
Michael Hart
Introduction
We keep hearing about how we are in "The Information Age," but rarely is any reference made to any of four previously created Information Ages, and technology changes that were as powerful in their day as the Internet is today.
The First Information Age, 1450-1710: The Gutenberg Press, reduced the price of the average book four hundred times. Stifled by the first copyright laws, which reduced the books in print in Great Britain from 6,000 to 600, overnight.
The Second Information Age, 1830-1831 (Shortest By Far): The High Speed Steam Powered Printing Press, patented in 1830, stifled By Copyright Extension in 1831.
The Third Information Age, ~1900: Electric Printing Press, exemplified by The Sears Catalog, the first book owned by millions of Americans. Reprint houses using such presses were stifled by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1909.
The Fourth Information Age, ~1970: The Xerox Machine made it possible for anyone to reprint anything. Responded to by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.
The Fifth Information Age, ~Today: The Internet and Web. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million, books from A to Z are available either free of charge or at pricing "Too Cheap To Meter" for download or via CD and DVD. Responded to by the "Mickey Mouse Copyright Act of 1998," The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, The Patriot Act and any number of other attempted restrictions/restructures.
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The First Information Age
1450-1710
The one Information Age that gets any references at all is the age of The Gutenberg Press, where more books were made in the first half century of The Gutenberg Press than in a whole previous history of civilization.
However, it should be equally important to point out facts about how The Stationers Company worked for 250 years from the invention of The Gutenberg Press to lobby for laws that would return to them the previous monopoly they had on the entire world of publishing. While failure on failure on failure befell their political machinations, it should be noted that they never gave up even after success was apparent in 1557 with the passage of what I called the "Statute of Mary" turned out to be the passage of laws the people and the state were both loathe to treat as law.
However, another 150 years of intense efforts, culminating in the "Statute of Anne" in 1709-1710, finally created the basis of modern copyright law, in which most of the powers granted were to the publishers, with only a few crumbs for the authors of the works they published. The original law gave all rights to every word ever written in history to a business cartel known first as The Stationers Guild and in later times as The Stationers Company. The new law gave a first copyright term of 14 years to The Stationers Company and a second copyright term to an author, but only if that author was still alive and only of value if the works were still selling well after the initial 14 years.
Needless to say, in the early 1700's, neither case was anything remotely approaching a certainty, and the authors got very little chance to benefit from such a copyright.
Thus The First Information Revolution Bit The Dust
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The Second Information Age
The High Speed Steam Powered Printing Press
1830-1831 (The shortest Information Age on record)
While the 1700's were certainly The Age of Revolution from the point of view of nations such as The United States and, soon after, France, they were not The Age of Revolution for either publishing or copyright; both The United States and France adopted the copyright terms provided to England by The Stationers Company.
Thus the de facto copyright term stood at 14 years with an extension possible for an additional 14 years.
American copyright started with the U.S. Copyright Act, in 1790, which meant that the first decade of a United States best seller list entered into the public domain on January 1, 1829, which prompted the invention of the very first of the high speed steam powered printing presses in 1830.
However, this second Information Age was destined to be so short as to never make it into most history books, as there was such an intense effort by the American publishing lobby that the copyright law was extended in 1831, thus wiping a new Information Age out of existence, almost before it got started, literally.
The American version of The Stationers Company was alive—and well—even though it wasn't officially in existence.
It is hard to believe that a new copyright law should have been enacted to stifle the new high speed printing presses only a single year after the patent was issued.
The fortunes of "ye olde boye networke" were preserved, at the expense of the public domain, and this time instead of a 250 year Information Age before copyright intervened for the sole purpose of preserving "ye olde boye networke," it was an Information Age lasting only a single year.
Thus The Second Information Revolution Bit The Dust
(Footnote: While some view the intervening period from the U.S. Copyright Act of 1831 to this U.S. 1909 Copyright Act as an interruption of copyright extensions due to the U.S. Civil War, others will point out that extensions WERE made to U.S. copyright law in terms of breadth if not length.
One example would be that the Civil War photographs by the likes of Matthew Brady instigated on behalf of publishers, not so much for Brady, himself, the extension of copyright to include photographs and other items previously thought to have been outside the scope of intellectual property.)
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The Third Information Age
The Electric Printing Press
Circa 1900
For millions upon millions of Americans, the first "book" they ever owned was The Sears Catalog, one true revolution in the history of printing.
The Sears Catalog was feasible for three reasons:
1. Revolutions in Printing Technology
2. Revolutions in Railroad Transportation
3. Revolutions in Mail Delivery Standards
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1. Revolutions in Printing Technology
All through the 1800's, in spite of the restrictive legal wrangling that wiped out the first high speed presses the moment they were patented, more and more advances were in the works for making better and better printing presses.
By the end of the century there was a wealth of printings of public domain materials; pretty much anything that had been published before 1858 was being reprinted by 1900 in various "home libraries."
You could buy a home library of hydraulics that contained nearly every great publication on the subject from before 1858 for $10, or on the subject of health, law, etc.
This began the age of truly mass consumption of public domain books, and you can still find these at your local used bookstore.
However, you won't find nearly as many from AFTER 1909 as from BEFORE 1909, and here is why.
2. Revolutions in Railroad Transportation
and
3. Revolutions in Mail Delivery Standards
The combination of extremely inexpensive printing, plus a very efficient transcontinental railroad system, added to the new "Rural Federal Delivery" (RFD) of mail, created a new possibility never before considered:
"The Sears Catalog"
This was certainly one of the most revolutionary books in all of history.
A huge book, 768 pages, lavishly illustrated, and free to everyone Sears and Roebuck could give one to.
Apparently the most famous of these was the 1906 edition.
The problem?
The problem was that this made it totally obvious that it was possible to print and deliver millions of books for a price that was so low the books could be given away, free of charge, just for the purposes of advertising.
This made everyone aware of the changes in publishing prices, and a new wave of "reprint houses" sprung up near lots of railroad stations where those high speed printing presses could literally fill up a boxcar overnight and have it on the rails to anywhere in the country the next morning.
"Boxcars full of extremely inexpensive books!"
NOT what "ye olde boye networke" wanted to hear.
The result was yet another round of intensive lobbying to create the U.S. Copyright Act of 1909.
Once again, just as in 1831, the new technologies were no match for the trump cards held by "ye olde boye networke", which had been previously used to stifle The Gutenberg Presses and the high speed steam presses.
Thus The Third Information Revolution Bit The Dust
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The Fourth Information Age
The Xerox Machine
Pretty much everyone takes the Xerox machine for granted, even in Third World countries there are plenty of Xeroxes, at least for those who can afford them.
What we do NOT take for granted is that along with Xerox, came yet another copyright extension, once again trying a "reactionary politics" approach to stifle the advent of a new way of bringing information to the masses.
The oddest part, of course, is that the publishers' claim, such as it is, is that the new technologies will harm the sales of their products, but the LAW they proposed is NOT a law to enforce the protection of their copyrights but a law to destroy the protection of the public domain!!!
Each one of these four revolutions in printing technology has been countered by a law that was not designed to make a system for the protection of private property, but that was designed rather for the destruction of public domain, so that no one but the publishers could benefit from each new revolutionary technology that COULD HAVE BROUGHT BOOK BENEFITS TO THE WORLD AT LARGE FOR A MINIMAL PRICE.
The reason for this unhealthy alliance between publishers and politicians is that the politicians realize that their constituencies are
much more easy to manipulate when kept in ignorance, that an educated public is the enemy of the corrupt political system, and what more corrupt politicos than those of U.S. President Nixon's terms in office.
Thus it was that the Xerox machine was counteracted in an even more extreme case than previous copyright extensions with the elimination of copyright renewal requirements on copyrights that were never renewed 90% of the time, even though the process was trivial and the fee was nominal.
The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 was started during Nixon's time in office and carried out by his appointees after he left office in disgrace.
U.S. copyright had been extended from an average of about 30 years in 1900 to an average of 75 years in 1976, a far worse defeat for the public domain than ever before.
Thus The Fourth Information Revolution Bit The Dust
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The Fifth Information Age
The Internet
I'm sure more of you are aware of The Computer Revolution than of The Xerox Revolution or The Steam and/or Electric Press Revolutions, and probably even more of you than are aware of the real impact of The Gutenberg Press; example:
Were you aware that we might well have never even heard a word about The 95 Theses of Martin Luther if his friends hadn't taken them to the local Kinko's du jour and mailed the copies to other people in other countries?
The same sort of thing just happened recently when a very highly placed newsman, Dan Rather, anchorman, head editor and who knows what else of CBS News, was forced to resign by true nobodies who brought his lack of attention to the form (but not the content) of the letter describing a lot of bad behavior by President Bush.
With every new medium comes a new class of people, not of "ye olde boye networke," who adopt that new medium before "ye olde boye networke" is even really aware of it.
Once ye olde boyes ARE aware they do their best to stifle the new medium to only include their paid representatives who toe the official party line.
Hence the latest movements to decrease the speech freedom on the Internet, to let the big boys decide who and what should be seen and heard.