Actually, I sense that our understandings of the principles of copyright law are quite similar. I do get the idea, though, that you lack a practical understanding of what certain of the principles entail, especially when you reassert your idea of a progressive system of yearly renewal fees. And judging from the figures you quote (Did you pull them out of a hat the way a Dadaist poet chooses words?) I’d say you need to give some thought to the diversity of ways in which the material covered by these laws is created, stored and valued.

As I understand it the fundamental rationale for copyright protection is:

1. Creative intellectual work done by individuals and groups is beneficial to the society at large.
2. Creative intellectual work cannot be done if the individuals and groups doing it are unable to provide for their own well-being.
3. Therefore, the ability of individuals and groups doing creative intellectual work to provide for their own well-being is beneficial to the society at large.

I suspect we differ in what we understand the purpose of copyright to be.

I believe that copyright, in the United States, was justified as a means of advancing a unique national culture. It was intended (officially, at least) to encourage cultural production by institutionalizing in a limited way the legal fiction that products of human thought can be regarded as property. The purpose was to incentivize original and creative intellectual work by giving the author of that work a restricted period of time during which she could publish it and still maintain her exclusive right to refine, revise and exploit it. I don’t believe that it is merely coincidence that the amount of time originally allotted was roughly comparable to the amount of time it takes a human being to grow into a young adult.

I don’t believe the intention was to help insure a secure career path for artists and thinkers — any more than federal law insures such a path for teachers, bankers, pharmaceutical designers or firearms inventors. The point, it seems to me, was to provide a time during which the work could be nurtured by its creator. It would then provide benefit to society as a whole by passing into public domain.

Therefore, I would consider 50 years far too long a time to grant exclusive rights. Therefore, too, I would favor a tiered approach to annual copyright fees (starting at, say, $25 and gradually moving up to, say, $150). The intention here is to try to assure that the creator continues to value her creation sufficiently to warrant that the rights to it not be released to the public.

I gather from your remarks that you don’t share my interpretation of copyright — but I am not clear on what your interpretation is.

Can you explain it to me?

Thanks.

Yes, that’s correct: I would never object to Nina Paley’s right to do with her work as she pleases. My conviction is that she and anyone else should have the right to determine for themselves how, with whom, and on what terms they share the fruit of their creative labors.

As for copyright reform: Yes. I would like to see the laws returned to something like the pre-1998 terms. I was opposed to the Sonny Bono Act when it passed and I’m even more irritated with it now that I can see how it has caused a younger generation (Mike Caprio, for example) to see copyright as something which is only for the benefit of corporations.

In my view, a just copyright law is one which protects a creator’s right to preserve the integrity of his or her work and reap whatever benefits may come from it for the duration of his/her lifetime, plus some reasonable extension to provide for immediate heirs. When I say “reasonable extension,” I’m not exactly sure what that would be. Maybe the 1976 level of 50 years beyond the author’s life was too much. I don’t know. But 70 or 95 years is far too long.

I disagree with the idea of an annual fee, and the tiered system you describe sounds horrible. It would rachet up the pressure on the copyright holder as he/she grows older and increasingly infirm. Where’s the humanity in that? In the old days there were cases in which authors with poor business acumen or lousy representation lost their copyright by missing the one 28-year renewal deadline. Are you suggesting they should now be exposed to that sort of peril on a yearly basis? Who would end up on the short end of the stick under this sort of scheme — the big corporations, with their legion of lawyers, or the little guy?

Your comments are very interesting and constructive, Barry. Thanks.

I’m glad that you came along and made those points — they pretty much sum up my position on the whole debate.

Dan

Are you seriously saying that copyright is the only thing providing you with an honest wage? How do you think people made money before copyright existed? Why is your living wage tied to the issue of culture and art? Artists make art for the purpose of making art, and maybe also showing it to an audience; collecting a salary for work is a different thing, and has little to do with art and culture. The intersection of the interests of artists and the benefits conferred to them by copyright is very small, because copyright restricts their audience from seeing their works.

If the middle class is disappearing it’s because of class warfare, not because of people making copies of things.

I don’t really appreciate either that you’ve completely sidestepped my points without even trying to address them. Do you really not care that the public domain is shrinking? Would you rather that corporations owned all culture? Maybe you’re only interested in collecting a salary, and not really in producing art? If such is the case, I fully understand you not caring about culture at large.

I don’t think you are denying that Nina Paley had the right to release her work under a copyleft license. Do you propose that it be forbidden in the future? My guess is that you don’t. I think you are arguing simply that copyright laws not be eliminated.

Fair enough…but how about reformed?

How would you feel about cutting back the length of copyrights to 10 years, or 15, or 25? It is very difficult for me to see how locking cultural works up for 80 years benefits culture and/or society. In most cases it doesn’t even benefit the descendants of the artist in any significant way.

What about returning to a system, which would be much easier in this computer database age, of requiring that copyrights be registered? This could eliminate a great deal of uncertainty and expense in determining the owners of a copyright.

I am also in favor of an annual fee — it could be nominal — payable by the copyright owner. It could be a tiered system — very low fees for the first couple of years, somewhat higher thereafter, escalating by small increments periodically, for the life of the copyright. This would force copyright holders to consider whether a copyright still held value for them beyond a few years.

Under these conditions a work would be legally presumed to have been copylefted if the originator did not actively take steps to copyright it. This would set up a system where artists would have clear choices about how they wished to proceed. We would soon see, I think, a healthy competition between art-as-property infrastructures and art-as-gift institutions. As examples proliferated each artist would have a firm basis for choosing one course or the other.

What do you think?

Are you kidding? I have earned my living through the production of copyrighted material for many years and I am not a corporation. I have many friends and colleagues who also make (or until recently have made) their livings by creating copyrighted works. We are/were a part of the disappearing creative middle class that Jaron Lanier talks about — and which you apparently didn’t even have a clue existed.

Karl Fogel writes: “And, to make it a bit more personal, I’m a published author — as in, the books are in bookstores — whose books are available under open licenses.”

And are you also gainfully employed by a private, for-profit, opensource software company that makes millions of dollars in revenue around the world by providing technical support services to a segment of the very infrastructure that makes the changes we are discussing here possible? I’m just trying to understand your true interest in this discussion, Karl.

On one of your web pages you say you are anxious for the day when the cost (hence value) of what I and others create will “go to zero.” I wonder how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find that the value of your labor had gone to zero? What would you do then? Would you set up a PayPal account for donations? Or peddle t-shirts that say, “Out-of-Work Software Programmer/Technical Consultant”?

Mike Caprio your comments, in contrast to Karl’s, seem ingenuous. You talk about the problem of artists toiling under abusive work-for-hire arrangements, but what you obviously don’t understand is that while the value of our copyrighted work has plummeted in the past decade (because of the digital revolution) the large corporations have gained more and more leverage over us. My colleagues and I have been increasingly forced into ever more restrictive contracts.

As the value of copyrighted work approaches zero (to use Karl’s lovely phrase) only those who control vast blocks of it have any bargaining power. The very trend you are championing, Mike, favors the corporations over the little guy. So your opening statement (that there are no “people,” but only corporations, benefitting from copyright) is well on its way to becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. Thanks!

And if you doubt my statement about this trend favoring corporations, Mike, think for a moment: Do you really believe the political powers that be will one day wake up and force a corporation like 20th Century Fox, which spent $237 million making “Avatar,” to simply give their product away? The free-content singularity will not arrive. But it doesn’t have to in order to squeeze out the small independent artists who had once made their living by creating something of value (and I don’t mean t-shirts).

Anyway, why restrict ourselves to selling t-shirts? When the demand for those dries up (because everyone is selling them) we can always sell Chiclets.