Copyright Champion

 

Every now and then the practice of copyrighting “creative” works comes under fire. I’m going to jump into the debate this week and next by reprinting two posts from 2020. This first one was originally posted on this blog on January 13, 2020.

Copyright Champion

I recently looked for the copyright date in a book published by Viking, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House. Instead of the normal copyright warning, it made this statement:

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

I agree.¹

Some people argue that copyright inhibits creativity and knowledge by restricting what people can copy, but those people are wrong. First, I don’t understand how anyone can think that copying is creative. And boiled down to its basics, that’s all copyright restricts others from doing. So how can it inhibit creativity when the only activity it prohibits is the very antithesis of creativity?

Copyright is protected by the U.S. Constitution precisely because it encourages creativity. It isn’t a reward: it’s a bribe. It isn’t wages for an author’s or artist’s finished work: it’s motivation to start working in the first place. In other words, a writer doesn’t receive the copyright because he deserves it. He gets it as an incentive to keep writing.

Second, the law’s fair use doctrine ensures that copyrighted works can be borrowed to promote knowledge. “Fair use” is a complicated concept that is beyond the scope of this post, but I will cover it briefly next week.

Although I am a strong proponent of copyright protection, I do believe that the law can be improved. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to give authors the exclusive right to their works “for a limited time” but lets Congress decide what that time is. Right now, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus seventy years (or for 95 years for certain works where the legal “author” isn’t a known individual). I think that’s way too long. Copyright shouldn’t end with the life of the author since that penalizes writers and other artists who are 80 years old or dying of cancer, and they should be encouraged to write, too. But I could easily live with the life of the author plus twenty years and with 40 or 50 years for works without an individual author.

Copyrights foster creativity, and, like Penguin Random House, I support them.

But read next week’s blog post to discover how I feel about copyright bullies.

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¹ [Added September 11, 2023.] I do disagree with the part of the statement that implies all copying without permission violates the copyright laws, but that will be covered in my next blog post.