Author's Rights

On 4/9/96 Jeff Ankrom wrote:
>
> Copyright laws are important because they promote fair treatment
> of creators, but these laws are not a sine qua non for a healthy
> community of artistic creation. (After all, there were a few works
> of merit written before 1710.)

Jeff is right, obviously there were masterpieces of art, literature, and music long before there was copyright protection, but I put it to you that those works had a protection that was much better than law. Copying a book before Gutenberg took years of painstaking effort with pen and ink. Even after Gutenberg, copying of literary works was not simple. Designing and setting the type took a long time and considerable capital. Copying an oil painting, or a sculpture which doesn't have a mold is still pretty impossible. Frauds take years of effort and are fairly rare. Copying a print where the master is destroyed has been difficult until recently. Music copying was a big problem in Mozart's day. Again, available technology provided the protection. Scores were hard to duplicate, and people jealously guarded scores to control proliferation. As a result of such careful guarding I am sure many pieces have been lost.

The protection afforded by the technological difficulties in copying pre-Gutenberg also meant that public access was severely limited. It is in the interests of the public to both foster creativity and to increase public access.

In order to foster creativity you must compensate the creators. In a market economy that means you must give them some control over the market for their works. You can no longer depend on the difficulty of copying to give that market protection. In fact, the Statute of Anne was a recognition that the technology advances of that time (the printing press) had outstripped the means of protection afforded in the previous eras.

Our problem today is that technology has once again outstripped our means of protecting the rights to creative works. We cannot go back to the technologically dependent methods of protecting creative works that existed pre-1710. In fact, new technological advances have made it necessary for us to once again rethink how we can give a measure of protection to the creators, while not stifling public access to the works. We need some way to control and charge for minor uses of materials or portions of materials, like picking up a quote off the internet, playing a soundbite, running a piece of software, or showing some or all of a picture.

I have been hoping that the music industry, which was the first to have to deal with the increased ease of copying, may provide the rest of us with a model to handle the problem, but I understand that ASCAP and its method of licensing and royalty treatment is having a lot of problems.

Sigh.

Martha Luehrmann
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
MRLuehrmann[_at_]LBL.gov
tel 510-486-4303
fax 510-486-4386 Received on Tue Apr 09 1996 - 22:55:08 GMT