Now I know how Odin must have felt with the forebodings of Ragnarök. But who am I to be then... Odin or Enjolras? Feeling powerless against the rising tide, or not? Not only is my career as a currently unemployed translator at stake; many other creative professionals will be facing the same dire consequences - if we don't do something ourselves.
Most surely, this year's Advent Calendar will be about Save Our Internet and have to do with the history of copyright and resistance to it - maybe this very introductory article will be barred because the name of Enjolras (or any other Les Mis character) would be as encouragingly mentioned as Macbeth, if we just sit there idly instead of coming together for the cause.
Terms of copyright length - Extensions of Protection After Death
- Statute of Queen Anne - 14 years
- French Revolution (before Thermidor coup) - 35 years
- 1908 Berlin Act (first international standards) - 50 years
- Copyright Duration Directive, Maastricht 1993 (European Union) - 70 years
Why?
The European Union just set the term limit to life plus 70 years in 1993; because life expectancies were getting longer, they figured two generations meant seventy years (no longer fifty as before), and the media industry was so large that a work had financial value for much longer than it previously did.
There is no good reason for copyright to last so long. In a 2009 paper, economist Rufus Pollock estimated the optimal copyright term to be about 15 years.
If a theater company in Elizabethan or Jacobean London wanted to thrive and remain in the good graces of the monarch, it had to put on new shows at a fairly rapid pace. After all, most of the population, working sixteen-hour days and dodging between plagues, had a life expectancy of 35, so there wasn’t much time to waste. The stories and sources of stories were treated by the highly-collaborative theater companies as something like the Creative Commons of its time. This helped produced fast theater, but not always fresh writing. Still, the churn of 16th century drama serves the point emphasized in the Duke article when it quotes Judge Richard Posner, an occasional critic of IP laws, who says, “Romeo and Juliet itself would have infringed Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeo and Juliet…which in turn would have infringed several earlier Romeo and Juliets, all of which probably would have infringed Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe.”
Of course, underlying the whole movement to reverse, limit, or abolish creator rights is the oft-asserted premise that the technological age in which we now live can only thrive and best serve society if we remove or restrict some of these old notions that creative works can be property.
Let’s not just ask what the public domain can do for us; let’s ask what we can do for the public domain. In particular, as of this year more than 14 years have passed since the Web started to explode into public consciousness.
Would any nineteenth- or twentieth-century tale of star-crossed lovers have been legal if Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was under copyright at the time? Probably not. Of course, if copyright existed in Shakespeare's time, as Judge Richard Posner observed, “Romeo and Juliet itself would have infringed Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeo and Juliet . . . which in turn would have infringed several earlier Romeo and Juliets, all of which probably would have infringed Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe.” Artists build upon the past. Creativity depends upon a healthy public domain.
The simple fact is that there are communities of people who wish to work for a more fair copyright—and fight for better access to knowledge, fast and reliable technology and connectivity, and a robust shared public domain. This mobilisation should be continued and strengthened so creators, users, and the public interest can begin to take back the levers of policy to create a balanced copyright that truly rewards creators, and upholds the rights of users to access, reuse, and further contribute to our knowledge and creative commons.