Re: droit de suite

On 04/03/2000, Pat Sloane <patsloane[_at_]aol.com> wrote:
>
> Actually, the price of books is rather low, and nobody is seriously
> arguing that we need to eliminate copyright to spare the public any
> harm done or hardships suffered by the price of books being "too
> high." Royalties paid to a writer are rarely more than 5% or 10%
> of the cost of a book, a mere piffle no more burdensome to the
> book-buyer than sales taxes. Also, nobody seriously argues that
> there's any public benefit to be gained by eliminating copyright --
> that, say, if we could get the price of books down by 10%, then
> people might do more reading.
>
> So what drives the raging against copyright, if it isn't any kind
> of desire for the public good? Seems to me it's the larcenous lust.
> Eliminate copyright and you deprive the writer of the opportunity to
> profit from his work. But you've correspondingly opened the door for
> anyone other than the writer to profit from the writer's work. The
> T. S. Eliot estate makes a million dollars a year from the literary
> properties he left. Knock out copyright, and that million dollars
> is up for grabs. Anyone, even you, could print and sell his books
> without paying royalties and get a piece of the action. What I'm not
> understanding is why you regard it as obnoxious if the money goes to
> the writer or his heirs, and preferable that it go to anyone other
> than the writer or his heirs.

Nobody is seriously arguing for the elimination of copyright; only against its expansion. The public domain has value for several reasons. First, it allows ALL authors a pool of works upon which to draw in fashioning their own original creations. Second, even as to reproductions of existing works, one of two things happens: either the price is reduced, to the benefit of the public; or else the publisher adds original commentary (a scholarly forward, for example) to justify keeping the price the same. Thus, the public domain fulfills copyright's purpose of serving the public welfare, either by encouraging new works or by reducing the cost of disseminating existing expression.

More fundamentally, the debate on this topic is a familiar one: is copyright a "natural" right of the author, which entitles the author to the greatest possible economic reward; or is free speech a "natural" right of the public, and copyright a limited exception that is necessary only to encourage the creation of new works. The U.S. has chosen the latter as its starting point; but no country has a system that is exclusively based on one or the other view. All countries recognize that copyright needs to balance the interests of the author or artists against the public interest.

Tyler T. Ochoa
Associate Professor
Whittier Law School
<tochoa[_at_]law.whittier.edu> Received on Tue Apr 04 2000 - 22:19:13 GMT