The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [69]
THE CASE FOR BOOKANEERING
Artists and pharmaceutical companies have a lot in common. However much we like to think of pop stars and other artists as interested only in the deeper meaning of their art, they like to make money too. As Paul McCartney once said, “John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.’ ” If they can’t earn the pool through what they create, most will stop creating.
Yet the ownership of raw ideas—a poem or a melody—was always a more controversial concept than ownership of things made of ideas, like drugs. Books were protected in seventeenth-century Britain through a monopoly over printing granted to the Stationers’ Company, which kept a registry of all titles in a vellum-bound volume in London’s Stationers’ Hall.
But the first copyright law was only passed by the English Parliament in 1709, after the Stationers’ Company lost its 140-year monopoly in 1694, unleashing cutthroat competition in the printing business. After independence, the United States Congress followed the English lead, passing a copyright act in 1790 that granted publishers protection for fourteen years, with the chance of a fourteen-year extension. It had one novel twist, however. It covered only American authors—freeing American printers to copy foreigners’ work at will. Foreign information was free; domestic information was not.
American printers rushed to snatch up and republish English bestsellers, sending their prices tumbling. According to one report, in 1843 Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which in England cost the equivalent of $2.50, cost merely six cents in the United States. Americans’ refusal to protect foreign works lasted until 1891, by which time a domestic literary scene had emerged and American writers had started to clamor for protection from the cheap imports. Even as Congress extended the protection to foreign works, it threw a bone to domestic printers by limiting copyright only to works from overseas that were typeset in the United States.
This provision remained in place in various forms until 1986, leading to vociferous complaints of American piracy, or “bookaneering,” as some English writers called it. The famed British composer Sir Arthur Sullivan even paid American musicians to sign their names to some of his scores, like that of The Mikado of 1885, and transfer the rights back to him. That way he could gain copyright protection otherwise unavailable to a foreigner.
“The present American copyright regulations tend to keep all English and Continental authors in a state of irritation with something American,” wrote Ezra Pound in 1918. “There is a continuous and needless bother about the prevention of literary piracy, a need for agents, and agents’ vigilance, and the whole matter produces annoyance, and ultimately tends to fester public opinion.”
Many of the arguments articulated by the current crop of Internet rebels were first made many years ago by the pirates of generations past. In the eighteenth century, members of Congress claimed that withholding copyright protection for popular imported works would serve a virtuous purpose: providing cheap books to an increasingly literate population. Complaints by English writers were, by comparison, minor irritants. Today’s warriors of the online revolution argue that file sharing enables an unprecedented access to music, a self-evident good. They hold the music labels and the Hollywood studios in the same sort of disregard as Congress held eighteenth-century British writers.
RADIOHEAD’S EXPERIMENT SUPPORTS an additional point with which contemporary pirates want to clinch the argument. Giving away intellectual property for free would allow its creators to make more money than if they were to keep it under locks. If in the past artists toured to promote their latest album, today the latest album would promote concert tours. A band that gave away songs for free online