According to Jackson (2002, p. 427-8), the printing press cannot be held responsible for the development of copyright since other regions, with the advent of print, like China, did not.
Today, copyright law is being amended in response to new technologies, but the necessity of and implications of copyright itself tend to go unquestioned by the media. The reason it has been difficult to legislate is that intellectual property is a flawed concept. It does not draw the distinction between content as property and content as product.
If content is treated like a product, it should not matter what the end user does with that content, but as property it exists only to serve the owner’s interests. In either case, who can claim ownership of it? To investigate this problem, ten articles relating to copyright were sampled and the essay that follows is an examination of both paradigms and implications of copyright.
Content as Property
According to Reynolds & Stoianoff (2003, p. 1-14), copyright emerged as common law in 1709 with The Statue of Anne, which gave authors the right to control the reproduction of their works. This was not meant to be applied to the large mass production of work that we see today and was based on the idea of property being one’s own only in so far as one could protect it (you cannot own air unless you bottle it).
According to Fleming & Marien (2005, p 300-1), what the printing press did for the Renaissance was allow for a greater spread of information, but that promotion and professionalizing of the arts was a direct result of the emerging merchant class. The word artist, in fact, comes from the word artisan, as in craftsman, and during this period, artists would work on a commission basis.
In response to copying technology, and perhaps other trends from within the art and literature community, copyright has since moved creators away from work-for-hire and more toward a deed-holder who decides what is done with said content. And this is reflected in the Copyright Amendment Act (2000) with the moral right to oversee how said content is used.
In response to moves by the French government to open iTunes music to mp3-players other than the iPod, Anderson (2006) quotes Francisco Mingorance of the Business Software Alliance in the Washington Post as saying that the French policy is about ripping off the technology from those who developed it.
The logic here is that the companies deserve income from their investment in the process, while the reality is that access to the technology is a consequence of having had the time and money to develop it in the first place.
Article comments
1 - methuselah
There are several flaws in current copyright laws, the result of an incremental creep toward monopoly control thru the efforts of corporations large enough to pay the high rates of lobbyists with good connections in compliant federal government.
1-the putative purpose of copyrights is to protect the intellectual, time and money investment of artists, partly to reward them for their efforts and partly to encourage successful artists to create more works, financed thru the royalty proceeds from earlier creations. This would be a reasonable plan, and it had worked in the past, protecting artists from exploitation by malevolent copying businesses and, to a lesser extent, casual pilfering by end-users. But this system was defeated by the great efficiency of large businesses that succeeded in discounting the future profits of artists by contracting them very early in their careers so that the corp would get the royalties and the artists would basically get day-wages for their efforts. The best known example of this is the rock music industry in which a $15 CD nets the artist less than a dollar. Where the recording company didn't have a prior contract with which to discount the artists earnings and capture it for themselves, they simply ignored the artist or used legal force and the superiority of resources to overwhelm the artist. Not only that, but as the royalty reward to authors of songs began, through enforcement, to produce revenue, unscrupulous individuals insisted that they be listed as co-authors to songs though they had cntributed nought to the composition. This was done under threat of exercising monopoly access to markets to browbeat artists into acquiescence.
2-copyright durations have been egregiously extended by a federal congress submissive to the demands of corporations eager to extend their de-facto monopolies far beyond the short time originally allocated to allow an artist to recoup his investment and make a reasonable profit.
3-the civil courts have shown consistent favoritism toward the Goliath companes against the David artists, either by outright findings against artists, or by allowing delaying tactics that had the same result: justice delayed is justice denied. Perhaps the judicial principle here is the belief that it is safer to harm a little artist with a wrong ruling than to harm a big company, many of whose stakeholders may be harmed.
2 - chancelucky
Jonathan,
I agree with your basic point. The operative word in "copyright" seems to be "copy" and technology has made copying so easy that the technology of enforcement really can't cope.
The Japanese system of declaring certain individuals "national treasures", encouraging them to teach+share their art/craft with others and also guaranteeing the master a comfortable living may make as much sense as anything these days.
As you point out, academic tenure works that way in some ways, but it also generally forces these individuals to teach which often can be a different skill entirely.