Digital Barbarism, page 10
Almost unbelievably, a common misconception among the copyright abolitionists is that the value of a book or article is primarily physical. This view contradicts their stress on the (literally) insubstantial nature of a work—and thus, in their conception, the imperative of removing from it all forms of exclusive control—but, then, they often hold tenaciously to opposing positions. Accordingly, if one of their exemplars copies verbatim someone else’s book, buys the paper and the ink, prints and carts around the books, advertises them, he’s just as much entitled to the proceeds of, for example, Gravity’s Rainbow, as is Thomas Pynchon. As one of them puts it, in ignorance of grammar and the difference between handwriting and type, “I did all the work of typing in the manuscript just like he did.”41
Today, while driving into town to get a haircut at a barbershop where the calendar is open to January, 1952, I listened to Alfred Brendel playing Mozart cadenzas. I paid for the CD, as I would rather honor Alfred Brendel than steal from him. How often I have dreamt that I might play like that, and sadly reminded myself that, even if I had the pure musical talent, twelve hours of practice every day for the next twenty years would not do it. I have a wonderful piano, can play the first fifty-two bars of “Für Elise,” my rendition of which drives away rats and snakes. Given a few hundred years, I might eventually hit every note, in order, of a transcription of Brendel’s cadenzas. But everything else would be lacking, and where the value lies is precisely in everything else. Needless to say, the value added in a novel has little to do with the paper, ink, printing, binding, distribution, or sale of a book. These, as copyright opponents so often point out, are not even necessary conditions for the existence of a work, as anyone who has spent years writing a book is well aware. Depending upon numerous variables such as length, materials, print run, scheduling, and other parametric costs, a physical hardcover book is worth two or three 2008 dollars, more or less. Overhead, shipping, and selling add more. But the buyer judges the real value to be in the content, or he would buy books by the pound, blank books, or whatever book came blindly to hand.
Nor is the unique value in the plot, the themes, or the ideas, as these are, as copyright opponents also repeatedly point out, the common property of mankind and freely available from countless millions of sources. As much as Alfred Brendel cannot claim to own the individual sounds of the notes he plays, neither I nor anyone else can claim ownership of the words in books. What can be claimed, however, the value added, is their unique arrangement, skillful or otherwise. Perhaps there are people who do not have the ability to distinguish one work from another except in a programmatic comparison of plot, idea, or theme, and thus do not understand the essence of what they read. In regard to music, they would lack the ability to distinguish between Alfred Brendel and Vladimir Horowitz, or perhaps even between Alfred Brendel and me. Thus, not surprisingly, what explains the belief that typing a novel into a computer entitles the typist to many of the same privileges as its author, is nothing more notable than a coarse sensibility.
Closely related to the material fallacy is yet another misapprehension, advanced as a debunking of fallacy. Addressing the example of a house as a form of property that, unlike a copyrighted work, is protected indefinitely, a petitioner states, “The fallacy of this argument is that the building owner had to put money into the project before receiving any return.”42
So, there was no investment in, for example, the writing of Moby Dick, or of Appalachian Spring. Perhaps such a notion should not be surprising in light of the belief that pushing a button to download something confers rights equal to those of its author. But it is exemplary of something I myself have observed since childhood, for instance, in the philistine mistreatment of John Cheever.
People would demean him behind his back and to his face, often under the flimsy cover of a half joke, and their premise more often than not was that what he did was not real work. When he struggled they intimated that he deserved it, and when he triumphed they intimated that he did not. If the work of your life can be compassed on a foot or two of bookshelf, what can you have put in it, and are you not by definition one of a species of cunning sloth? In John Betjeman’s “Reproof Deserved, or, After the Lecture,” come the lines:
“Betjeman, I bet your racket brings you in a pretty packet
Raising the old lecture curtain, writing titbits here and there.
But, by Jove, your hair is thinner, since you came to us in Pinner,
And you’re fatter now, I’m certain. What you need is country air.”43
Where is the investment indeed? A brief against this view has been made searingly well in the lives of writers, poets, and composers, from Samuel Johnson through Melville and Dos Passos; from Blake through Emily Dickinson and Randall Jarrell; from Mozart through Schumann and Erik Satie. Anyone who has read a biography of such a person knows the categories of investment by heart, but rather than approach them historically, consider the hypothetical example of what these days would be considered a wildly successful writer, who has just sold his book for a million dollars. Just imagine; for making up a story and tossing a ream of typing paper in a box at an editor in a cubicle in a skyscraper, you get a check for a million dollars. Why would such a creature need sympathy from, for example, his college classmate, a lawyer for the EPA, who pulls in a hundred thousand dollars a year?
But look closely. It took the creature ten years to write the book. That means they’re even. But not quite, because, if they live in, let us say, New York, the creature is going to pay the top federal, state, and city tax rates on his earnings (income averaging having vanished long ago), in addition to the unincorporated business tax and both his and the employer’s share of the Social Security tax. Without a steady income the creature (who writes as a profession, not a hobby) cannot possibly get or keep a mortgage, so in addition to forgoing a long-term escalator ride on equity, he forgoes a mortgage deduction as well. Nor can he build equity in claiming more than one year’s maximum retirement plan deductions—if he is able, absent an income stream, to have a retirement plan at all. All things considered, he will be left with an average, over a comparable decade (during which he completely depleted his savings), of about forty-five thousand a year, whereas his friend the lawyer, including what he may earn from money invested over the same period, will be left with an average of approximately seventy-five thousand (a lower adjusted gross income as a result of his deductions, a much lower tax rate from all jurisdictions, and no unincorporated business tax or employer’s share of Social Security).
When it comes time for the creature to send his children to college (if he can afford to have children) the college will look at the assets off of which he attempts to live—at 5 percent, the $450,000 he has put away, for example, will yield $22,500 before taxes annually—and declare that the family is too wealthy for a scholarship. By the same token, unless he is a screenwriter or holds another job, he will never be eligible for unemployment, and the assets that are his life preserver will bar him from welfare until he depletes them entirely. And this not exactly glorious profile is that of someone who has been able to collect a million dollars for his book, something that has always been rare and is even much less likely these days after the economic rationalization (relatively speaking) of publishing. The writers who make up the vast majority of those devoted to the profession will have no such luck with advances, and all the figures above are in their regard, I am afraid, almost purely hypothetical.
The investment is real. It often consists of years of work without compensation, living in or near poverty, ineligibility for aid, an unstable family life, and then going public with one’s deepest beliefs and fragile emotions only to have them savaged by critics who practice a blood sport for the entertainment of commuters on the 5:06 or someone relaxing on a beach. The investment is in sacrificing the ability to get a mortgage or sometimes even an apartment: try telling a renting agent that you’re a writer. A half a lifetime ago, my oldest friend, even then a leading photographer, went with me to a comida on the Upper West Side, where, at the end of a meal I was able to pay my share and retain two dollars for my wallet. “How much money do you carry?” he asked, amazed. I told him—this was in the late seventies—that I usually had five to seven dollars on me, which I thought was plenty. (Really, five was the goal, and the extra two dollars made me feel like John Paul Getty.) “How much do you carry?” I asked in return. His answer was, “A couple of hundred.” He had an American Express card, too, something that I looked upon like the chimps in 2001 gazing upon their mysterious plinth. And for a thirty-year-old writer, I was doing quite well.
Add to these elemental conditions the fervor of those who would abolish copyright, and the effect would be to reduce drastically what a publisher would pay an author because the publisher would be subject to immediate competing editions or downloads of any even vaguely successful book. (The truncation of copyright term, rather than pure abolition, would have commensurate effects, as would—in reverse—its extension.) Thus, the result of copyright abolition (or, by degrees, further limitation) would be to emphasize secrecy and speed in bringing out an edition, the power of marketing and promotion, and the means of distribution—the emphasis upon which, except for the first, has been a growing problem in publishing if only for its detrimental influence on the quality and integrity of manuscripts and their preparation, the corrosion of subject matter into the rust of nonsense or gossip, and the elevation of topicality and marketing. Even now in publishing, “celebrity” trumps everything.
But these problems would go nuclear in the absence of copyright. The world of letters would be vastly diminished, and what remained would become fairly unrecognizable. One of the many consequences would be the virtual disappearance of the profession of writing other than its migration into the academy, think tanks, or various other corporate bodies, where the cadre of writers would find themselves beholden to various types of department heads. With the disappearance of copyright, the sacrifice of the individual voice would be accompanied by the subjugation of the independent voice. Perhaps not coincidentally, at least the leaders of the anti-copyright movement (and likely many of their followers) are in this situation already, an advance guard the performance and temperament of which do not recommend well for the future. (In anticipation of the criticism that I myself am affiliated with a think tank, I should point out that I am not an employee, cannot by law receive direction, and derive only a small part of my income from such association.)
Most real writers have or have had other professions, at the outset of their careers anyway, having been forced to this by the nature of the informal apprenticeship they undergo. This is salutary and instructive, for it gives them knowledge of life and the world that one cannot get from writing school, the essential premise of which is unsustainable. Virtually no writers have not done something else, or a number of things. But when they began to get traction, however, it was possible to make the transition into writing as their sole activity, which, without the structure of copyright, would not have been feasible.
To the challenge that no one should have the right to expect to earn his keep as a writer or composer, and that holding down another job is hardly a tragedy, my answer is that just as a successful dentist, computer programmer, or dry cleaner has the right to expect a living if he can sell his services or his wares, certainly in the richest, most specialized economy the world has ever known, so should a writer if he can sell what he produces. It would be very easy to destabilize or abolish any profession simply by removing the essential laws or protections that make it possible. Such a great affection for a cause that would lead to the abolition of whole vocations at a stroke, especially ones so longstanding and so important to civilization, is frighteningly arrogant. In its essence it is similar to what Burke called the homicidal philanthropy of the French Revolution. But because those who recommend it are so often what I believe are called “dorks,” it seems not quite as threatening, like a My-Little-Pony™ version of the Khmer Rouge. People who fall in love with their own radical decrees tend to become thoughtless and cruel.
The oft-cited champion of the anti-copyrightists is Macaulay. That is, Thomas Babington Macaulay, one of the great though cracked pillars of English historiography, a genius of style and a learned and experienced statesman, who, with Carlisle, and various Trevelyans who were Macaulay’s relatives all, shaped the understanding of English history for more than a century. Despite his many faults, Macaulay was first among those and his influence has never been surpassed by any single practitioner of his craft, even if Churchill continues to threaten his displacement. In my education it was assumed that one would read Macaulay and study Latin, in much the same way that today it is assumed that a student will know about Harriet Tubman and collect aluminum cans. Macaulay’s oddities are perhaps best expressed by this subtle and arresting line from the Reverend Michael David Knowles’s short biographical essay: “In 1835 his sister Hannah left him to marry a promising young servant of the East India Company.”44 And he had very strange views, of which more later, about copyright. Just as today, boundless leaps in the technology of distributing information (which then made possible mass circulation periodicals and enormous print runs for books) shocked and rearranged the field, necessitating changes that in turn brought bitter debate. But in regard to the point here in question, even Macaulay deserts those of our contemporaries who regard his views as the seminal text for their own.
“You cannot depend,” he says, “for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works that require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives…. It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books.”45
Without a single fact, this is beautifully stated merely as an assertion. Of course, that is Macaulay’s great talent. He could make an argument so gracefully that those incapable of independent judgment would simply be carried along as if on fumes of ether. It is why he has so many disciples among the anti-copyright partisans, and why I have included this quotation that runs against their grain and yet is from someone they mercilessly revere. That they would imperil other than amateur concentration on writing or composing may be explained by a blindness to the potential of both as exemplified in the great texts or models to which one may aspire only if one is willing to shape one’s whole life accordingly. Or are they saying that the lines of work in which one finds Bach and Yeats are insufficiently demanding to justify full-time employment?
Then there is the following: “They are aggrandizing the rights of the content holder by stealing the existing rights of the content users.”46 I can best respond to this statement with the following story. Thirty-five years ago, my parents’ house was burglarized. The sound of a primitive alarm I had rigged up, muffled as it came from the attic, was interpreted by the burglar as an approaching police siren. He grabbed his loot, jumped in his car, and sped off at panic speed over the lawn and down an ever-narrowing dead-end road that eventually wedged his vehicle between two trees and elevated its front wheels. He then fled on foot, leaving a chunk of himself on a barbed-wire fence. The police had his car, wallet, burglar tools, rubber gloves, and stolen property in the trunk. In my naïveté, I thought we had nailed him. But he then showed up with his lawyer and accused us of stealing his car. Obviously, he fathered descendants.
From the same source, although not the same person: “One theory that supporters of ‘intellectual property’ have not considered. If this is property as they claim then it has value, and, more importantly, it can be taxed.”47 Of course, its earnings are taxed (and what kind of nonproperty is capable of generating a return?), as it itself is taxed upon the death of whoever owns it. But what we have here is, I believe, a call for a wealth tax on what the proponent believes is not actually property. Real estate is taxed this way, as are boats, cars, and other such things in various states and localities as a result of specific legislation, but most property—stocks, bonds, furniture, savings accounts, et al.—is not. Therefore, the fact that it is not taxed does not prove that it is not property, and the fact that it is property does not require that it be taxed. The comment above is an end run, like trying to put Al Capone away for nonpayment of taxes. But there is no Al Capone here, and the end run is simply mean-spirited flailing, a sign that whoever proposed it is ready to use whatever weapons are at hand without compunction but with obvious pride in his supposed cleverness and deliberate ruthlessness.
And if one is to be critical of semantics, the errors here cited flow as if from an inexhaustible well. For example, “Realistically, it’s Helprin asking for welfare. He is asking the government to give him a greater subsidy.”48 Based apparently on the belief that all property and labor are held in common, and that wealth is something distributed by the government rather than created by those the government taxes—a notion that, though widely credited, is logically impossible—the author of this judgment does not know the meaning of the word subsidy and thinks someone is a beggar and a freeloader for objecting to a proposal to command the product of other people’s labor without charge. But, why not? I’m just “a mouthpiece for the corporate copyright machines,”49 who wants “to muddy the waters so completely that the issue can’t be debated in good faith,”50 so as “to give politicians backing for their initiatives that lobbyists pay them for.”51 And, “it certainly is interesting that just as a new ‘copyright alliance’ [that is, the effort on the part of corporations with an interest in copyright to push against the tide, with lawyers and lobbyists attempting to fight a battle that will not be decided by lawyers and lobbyists but by public opinion] has formed to push for stronger copyright laws, we start seeing articles like this one…. A conspiracy-minded person might suggest that this is no coincidence.”52
