Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (best reads of all time .txt) 📕

control of an author’s works for a period after his death, will suppress them out of ignorance, spite, embarrassment, disagreement, or any combination of these things. His own circumstances vaguely suggest that he may uncharacteristically be close to making sense, in that he repeatedly holds up booksellers and their descendants as the villains in the piece, and his mother’s father was a bookseller. Perhaps no serpent has sharper teeth than a child’s embrace of a cause hostile to a parent’s deepest belief, but we shall leave that to Freudian tragedians. It is a good argument, the best he offers, but although one can even reinforce it with further examples—such as Lady Burton’s incineration of her husband’s possibly randy papers—it can also be countered: if not fully, then at least enough to illustrate that Macaulay’s remedy is disproportionate.

Because the suppression he fears goes against human nature and self-interest, its likelihood is slight. It is in fact exceedingly unlikely. Rather than people suppressing the work of their forbears, they crowd the channels of publishing with attempts to promote it, especially given that the slightest touch of fame or even, particularly these days, infamy, will be to their practical advantage. You could probably make a really fat category in the Dewey Decimal System to shelter scandalous books that people write about their scandalous ancestors, much less worshipful accounts and level-headed ones.

Further, a writer himself has this right during his lifetime and is just as likely to exercise it: that is, unlikely (but, in view of shame, conversion, and embarrassment by youthful indiscretions, not impossible). Presumably, however, he would rather, in regard to this right, exercise constructive influence and wisdom in delegating it. Entirely apart from any consideration of money, I would much rather have my children in charge, and in charge of subsequent delegation, of a book I might write, than simply floating it out into the hands of anyone who might distort or violate it. And, who knows, perhaps relatives who might withhold and suppress might be correct in doing so. It would have been a great loss had Boswell’s eldest son, who was mortified by his father’s subsidiary relationship to Johnson, been able and willing to withhold for a time the publication of the Life (the destruction of a manuscript and obliteration of a work, as in Richard Burton’s case if one considers his papers the work they undoubtedly were, is a subject and peril unrelated to the question of copyright or copyright extension). But how fortunate if a young and hypothetical Brittany Hitler, after her father’s hypothetical death and as the Nazi Party was about to pick up steam, could have suppressed Mein Kampf.

Not surprisingly, Macaulay closes his weak argument with bluster. In this case, both a prediction and a threat. If copyright protection were extended beyond the life of the author, he predicted, shall we say, vigorously, “Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher,”—please note that the act against which Macaulay spoke did not prohibit the sale of books—“this law will be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.” He then spends nine lines explaining that “at present the holder of copyright has the public firmly on his side,” and that in regard to copyright, non-extended, “pass this law: and that feeling is at an end…. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in on the plot.”72

A declaration so ringing and so firm begs the question, if one were so willing to violate a copyright a year after the author’s death, then why not a year before? If ten years after, why not ten years before, and so on? The public is all for authorial rights, and is firmly on the side of the author and his requirements—until his death, when, presumably, his wishes would mean nothing. The public, having honored him the day before, would no longer honor him the day after his death, because he would have been blank in regard to projecting what would follow him. This would of necessity be based on Macaulay’s supposition that a deceased author, supposedly like Johnson, would not have valued extension. And it would be a rather arcane motivation for so widespread and, according to Macaulay, passionate a crime. Not only is it logically impeachable that an author would rather have some shin of beef than the extension of his rights and thus the grant of their heritability, but if such an author existed, then he could easily refuse such an extension. If he did not, then by definition he would value it, thus destroying the structure of Macaulay’s rationale, mocking his indignation, and invalidating his predictions. And, vastly in the main, of course, authors do not make such refusals.

Macaulay’s general prediction comes in the form of a question posed in 1841 and answered thoroughly in the more than 167 years since. “The question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe or The Pilgrim’s Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great grandson of a bookseller.” 73 This question is representative of Macaulay’s belief, and that of his modern devotees (most of whom probably have not read him), that copyright suppresses, stunts, and retards the flowering of culture, and specifically the production and availability of books. The answer is decisive.

Not only the original but subsequent acts have been passed, their existence putting to the test Macaulay’s theme of works locked up, the deleterious effects of ‘monopoly,’ his general argument, and the validity of his predictions, which are nothing if not embarrassing. How embarrassing? In 1825 approximately 600 titles a year were issued in England; by 1900, 6,000;74 in 2005, 206,000.75 And that is just England. The United States followed closely with 172,000,76 with the number of books published just before the 1998 “infamous”