All rights reversed


 


(Hey, another anagram post title! Collect them all!)

Mark Helprin has, in the New York Times, an op-ed piece for a really bad idea : eternal copyright. Now I haven't read Helprin: I have a copy of A Winter's Tale, but haven't gotten around to reading it. It sounded like the kind of stuff I'd like, but, well, I have to finish this textbook on direct current machinery, and then this biographical novel on Brian Boru, and then this Fu Manchu novel...and so it goes.
But it sounds like something a writer would like: you've made this wonderful thing out of spit, baling wire, imagination and heart's blood? Why shouldn't it be, simply, yours? Forever? If you stole that land from the indians and built a house on it, your descendants would be able to live on it until the sun swallows it like a red beach ball, right? If you made a couple of million selling sweetened breakfast cereal shaped like religious symbols, that's yours, right? So why all that, an d not this Wonderful Thing?

There's two big problems with this argument. The first is one that I find suspicious, in that it leaves out a great chunk of the copyright picture. Helprin doesn't talk about corporate ownership, and makes an argument heavily colored by familial sentiment. (What have you got against Katherine Mansfield's poor kids? Can't Sylvia Plath's heirs have biscuit now and then?). Unfortunately this sounds like the completely disingenuous attacks on wetlands preservation, when folks would inveigh about poor granny unable to drain that swamp back of her house for a badminton court, when 'granny' translates to 'Kerr-McGee' and 'badminton court' more accurately converts to 'paper mill.' This, unfortunately again, is the type of thing I've grown to expect from someone at the Claremont Institute .)
It is reasonably creepy, though, that Helprin makes these illustrative choices: Katherine Mansfield died childless, after a miscarriage and being given gonorrhea. Whoever Mansfield's heirs were they would not be her kids. And Sylvia Plath--well, her works got edited posthumously by the man who ditched her for another woman. Ted Hughes was separated but not divorced from Plath, and utilized his heirship to manage if not mangle her literary legacy. I don't know if it's Mr. Helprin's Krell-boosted subconscious sending his id-monsters to tear up his own argument, but it's positively fascinating in a creepy sort of way: Mansfield's marriage to John Middleton Murray was also punctuation by flagrant adultery on the husband's part, and the literary husband-heir outlived the wife and managed her memory. Helprin makes a blissful invocation of loving children who should of course! profit from that loving legacy--and presents two terribly problematic examples of victimized and abused artists. When 'adoring children' becomes 'abusive/unfaithful husband' the sentimental mask slips badly.

But there's a much bigger elephant in the room: copyrights can be sold. Either after or before death, the copyright to an artistic work can be sold to somebody else with absolutely no right to sentimental consideration. Does a corporation deserve the right to that piece of intellectual property forever and ever, even if all they did in terms of deserving it was to buy it? Helprin does not say this--but of course he is arguing for it.
I worked for many years in an industry that squeezed the copyrights out of creative artists (all nice and legal like) and built empires out of them. And I agree with Helprin: the heirs of Walter Gibson (the goddamn creator of the goddamn Shadow) should profit from his work--and Roz Kirby should have been utterly fabulously wealthy. Condé Nast should not profit from buying Street & Smith forever, though, nor should the people who bought Marvel Comics who bought it from the people who bought it from the people who bought it from Martin Goodman should not have those Wonderful Things forever. I may be being unfair to Helprin: I've long been in favor of a copyright that gives the creator rights for life + n years--but a transferred copyright only lasting for 17 years. It wasn't all that long a piece, and maybe something like that would be part of a comprehensive proposal of his. If so, I'd be more in sympathy with his impulses.

But only if.

But even if we're to ignore the elephant of corporate ownership of copyright, there's still that other major point that will, I'm afraid, keep me and my compañero Mark on opposite sides of No Man's Land (once known as Public Domain).

It is that this is not property: it is privilege.

I mean this in the old literal sense: privi+ lege = private law. A copyright, like a patent, is a government granted monopoly given to a private individual (or a corporation). It is a law that says other people are not allowed to use this Wonderful Thing, except under certain circumstances and for certain fees. It, plain and simple, a private law issued on behalf of the creator.

And Mark Helprin is saying that privilege should be eternal. And I don't think so. I think that's contrary to the principles on which our country is based. And I think that many folks hunger after real and permanent privilege, and that we fought a number of wars (ostensibly) to keep it from happening.

Nobody can take The Bell Jar away from Sylvia Plath, or The Garden Party away from Katherine Mansfield. They are tied by fact and memory. But the heirs can't live in it, ride it, or use it to stop a bunghole: where is it? how tall is it? How much does it weigh?

A novel is not a painting or a statue of a house--and it's just as well, for then They would have carted it off during the hapless artist's lifetime. A story weighs nothing, passes through walls and time without so much as a quiver--kind of like neutrinos, actually.
But like neutrinos, a story might as well be nothing if it doesn't interact with other things. Neutrinos are seen only in the changes they effect in other more tangible particles. If they are properties, they are worth about what a cubic yard of neutrinos are worth: not zero, but x divided by zero.

The founding fathers at least knew some of this: they understood that the worth of Art is a social worth, and that is the basis on which it should be encouraged. And so they set up a temporary privilege to encourage the production of things that enrich society. (It's right there in the constitution: I'm only paraphrasing a little bit.)
What Helprin wants is for that government enforced privilege to last forever. He wants the government to actively restrict people's personal freedom, snoop and spy and search out threats to his privilege, and fine and jail people who defy that privilege.
We've agreed to that, and we do that, largely out of a respect for creators. But Helprin wants that privilege to last forever. He phrases it as if it's to be Property--but that's not it, because property can decay, property can be taxed, property can be condemned for lack of upkeep, property can get this really grody stain on the lower right corner and smell kind of gruesome. No, Helprin is arguing that it become Law.

And permanent institutionalized privilege embodied in law is precisely the opposite of America.

Posted: Monday - May 21, 2007 at 03:32 PM        

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