Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about copyright quite a bit. It’s a matter of universal serendipity[1] that this topic should return to me, karma-esque, in a very tangible way. (Someone was ripping off the Lolcat Bible text and selling it also on CafePress. I’ve since reported it to CP and they took care of it, which is great. All’s well that ends, as they say, well.) But before all that, I was thinking about what the optimal length of copyright should be. Considering what its true purpose was (to allow artists to benefit from their work), the current length of a copyright is, let’s face it, completely absurd to the point where we don’t even have words to describe it. Ridiculous, preposterous, farcical—these are powerless in the face of the perversion that is copyright.

“Let’s face it: if someone wasn’t successful in marketing their product the first time around, waiting thirty-five years for it to become ironically trendy isn’t going to save their ship.”

Copyright currently persists some 70 years after the creator’s death. How this allows the creators to benefit is something I’m not exactly clear on. Perhaps the afterlife has a SWIFT code. If not, this length is somewhat outside the point of copyright. If we take into account how long copyright should be were it actually fulfilling the purpose that everyone claims it’s for, I figured that it should last probably a little longer than ten years. It makes sense if you think about it. Ten years is roughly the length of time that it takes something to go out of style. Sure, things come back in style again, in accordance with the Department of Retro’s Instruction 3910. But let’s face it: if someone wasn’t successful in marketing their product the first time around, waiting thirty-five years for it to become ironically trendy isn’t going to save their ship.

Unfortunately, before I had time to really delve into the details, an economist, Rufus Pollock, published a study determining the optimal length of copyright to be fourteen years. Figures. Now no one will believe my story of having deduced the optimal length of copyright on my own, and they’ll just say I copied off this other guy. Oh well. I’ll play the zeitgeist card, instead, and say hey, maybe we’re on to something here.

With that in mind, I’m sure there are plenty of artists who would like to retain copyright over their entire lives; I can see the appeal of this. But at the same time, I can’t imagine that anyone would maintain that they want copyright to last 70 years after their death, as if this is some sort of tribute. It’s certainly not helping anything, because when you’re dead, you “live on” through your work, so to speak. But if it’s all locked up by copyright, when you die literally, you really do die figuratively, too, because what’s left of you is mired in legal tar.

At this point I’m wondering how I could incorporate this into my will. I don’t actually have a will yet (I need to rectify that), but when I do, I think I’d like to put in a clause that says any work I still own the copyright to should be placed in the public domain. All these authors like Cory Doctorow and Jo Walton talk about how important free information is and how copyright is evil. My suggestion to these people is: why don’t you place your work in the public domain upon your death? You don’t have any more use for it. In essence, you’re willing your intellectual property to everyone in the same way you will your physical property to individuals. Think how bittersweet it would be if, every time an author dies, we have access to all their writing. Their death would transcend mere mourning and general malaise, and instead turn into a sort of celebration of their life’s work.

As for the argument that heirs can benefit from someone’s work by retaining the copyright, I’d like to say to these heirs, make your own dang work. Your ancestors didn’t create art so as to more comfortably pad your buttocks. Get off them and do something productive yourself. At the very least, expand their work, a la Christopher Tolkien.

In addition to this, there’s another thing that’s holding people back from really getting excited about shorter copyright terms. It has to do with the general impression that we don’t have a robust public domain. The public domain has this reputation, I believe, as something of a garbage heap—all the works too old or too worthless to have a copyright—and that’s really unfortunate. There are plenty of great works in the public domain (everything published in the US before 1923), including works of Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and one of my personal favorites, Lewis Carroll—plus many more. I mean, just look at Project Gutenberg to see what’s available. It’s really amazing.

But what we don’t have in the public domain are contemporary works. For all the great literature we have in the public domain, most of it was written a century ago. What the average kids file-share these days is contemporary art. By the time a piece falls into the public domain, it has just about become forgotten, and nobody’s remixing it any more.

Many anti-absurdly-long-copyright activists point out that despite works such as Lewis Carroll’s writing being in the public domain, you can still buy the books in bookstores. In other words, the lack of copyright (and the free availability online) isn’t preventing books from being sold. This is substantiated. They also claim that freeing copyrighted works would greatly enrich our culture. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it—and I agree—but it really hasn’t been tried before. We don’t have many examples of this happening. Yet.

This would be another benefit of willing work into the public domain. It would put a lot more contemporary work out there for free use, and it would strengthen the “brand”, if you will, of the public domain. It would put the claim “shorter copyright = enriched culture” to the test. I think a lot of people believe the amount of monetary protection for an artist as an incentive to create outweighs the amount the culture would be enriched by having more work available to share. The only thing that’s going to convince the majority otherwise is showing them. Artists have to take the first step to reduce copyright. Willing their work to the public domain will pull the rest of the culture along.

I believe this act could be the single most powerful action an individual author could take to fight repressive copyright. If we get many artists together to do this, we could collectively undermine copyright within two generations—even if our legislators fail to change the law.

-Ted

1. I stole the phrase “universal serendipity” from Dave. It’s quite useful. [Top]