Every so often, online chatter gets round to hashing over the issues of copyright. This time, the forum's Alas, a blog, and the trigger was the recent Harry Potter release.
I find these discussions interesting primarily because they are rarely graced with the presence of a legal expert in copyright law, and are therefore expositions of what regular folk think copyright encompasses.
Googling a bit, I came across Lawrence Lessig's article, Copyright Law and Roasted Pig, which mentions in passing that the US Congress has been so generous in the last century in extending copyright beyond its historical time limits, that books published in 1930 will not enter the public domain earlier than 2019.
2019.
It's no wonder that people nowadays think that copyright is something to which an author or an artist is entitled till the day they die. And beyond, if they have heirs.
It didn't used to be that way. The US Constitution provided for 14 years automatically, and another 14 for a fee, and that was that. After 28 years max, creative works were considered available for public use.
Consider how this plays out when thinking of entities like GlaxoSmithKline, or Monsanto, and how zealously they seek, first to establish their right to copyright, not just patent, but copyright, particular innovations, and then to keep those copyrights in force over decades.
From the US Patent and Trademark Office website, a patent grants
"the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention.
Okay, so, that's a patent. You, as the inventor, get the right to monopolize the market for your stuff, provided you can create one. Most corporations are big on patents, and provide substantial incentives to employees for devising innovations that can be patented. Very few have sought, however, to lay claim to copyrighting those works.
So what's a copyright, then?
Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of "original works of authorship" including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.
The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine.
If you think about the two in sculpture terms, a copyright is positive space, whereas a patent is negative space.
This is the flip side of the coin that is suddenly so interesting to the gene-splicers. Gene-splicing's fiddley business. A teeny trim to the left, and it's a completely different procedure, not covered by an existing patent. Moreover, a patent's life cycle plays out after 20 years. Copyrights, these days, are damn near forever.
Also, copyrights cover derivative works. In writing or painting or composing, derivative works control means that, for instance, if I wanted to write a story about this Muggle who can nevertheless control a broomstick and who fancies herself a hot Quiddich player, and who bamboozles her way into Hogwarts as a student and goes through all manner of shenanigans and obfuscations to keep everyone from noticing her lack of Talent in order to play Quiddich, well, JK Rowling's prior claims currently mean no publisher will so much as use my manuscript to blow their noses.
Now, that's control.
In the hands of Monsanto, and those of GSK, what that level of control means to ordinary folk is the aggregation of basic life-sustaining materials into the aegis of for-profit, multi-national, business entities. In the case of Monsanto, whose products actively destroy their competitors (natural plants) in the wild, this is a monopoly the likes of which we have never seen.
