David Beresford Another Country Some years ago I had my first book published – the realisation of which had been a childhood ambition and the experience of which turned me against it as a profession. The publisher so far exceeded civilised parameters of incompetence that I was seized with the idea I had fallen victim of a conspiracy by British Intelligence (the book was about the IRA). I was only reluctantly disabused of the notion by the discovery that antipathy towards the publishing industry was common to most authors I met who harboured no suspicion of MI5.
I make that disclosure at the outset, because it may be with bias that I follow the current battles over the future of copyright, which is the cornerstone of the book- publishing industry. The challenge to copyright of course comes from the Internet with its potential to copy and distribute that threatens to make a mockery of control. But perhaps it needs be recognised that in the abandonment of that control lies a potential for the liberation of such as writers, artists and musicians, in the name of whom copyright is exercised. Copyright law has its origins in England with the system of royal patent grants that facilitated control of publishing, notably with regard to taxation. In the early 18th century the system was reformed to provide for the protection of authors against unauthorised copying for a limited time (28 years as it came to be) after which a work fell into the public domain. The principle was given international recognition by the Berne Convention in 1886, belatedly signed by the United States in 1988. The concept of copyright has suffered contradictions since long before the arrival of the Net. The system is designed for two purposes that are essentially inimicable to one another: the promotion of the widest possible distribution of works, which is considered to be in the public interest, and control – in practice the restriction – of distribution that is seen as being in the author’s interests.
Copyright law tries to overcome the contradiction with the additional concept of “fair” usage, which is intended to balance the competing interests by allowing limited copying for such purposes as news reporting, teaching, criticism and research. The nature of “fair usage” has proved almost impossible to define and the whole approach anyway falls foul of the right to freedom of information – the “free flow of ideas” – which is increasingly being seen as fundamental to constitutional law. It has become a form of control which is potentially counterproductive.
Two other examples of ill-considered control, where the Net offers something of a corrective, are pornography and state secrecy. Pornography comes with its own antidote, of boredom, if it is not shored up by the excitement of taboo. Vice squads could wipe out the industry – comparable, in its enrichment of the criminally minded, to Prohibition – if they would devote their energies and budgets to opening their own websites offering free access to confiscated material. Secrecy is similarly counter-productive. The Cold War years were haunted by the fear of nuclear holocaust, but in retrospect more damage was done to international interests by the government culture of secrecy and misinformation which marked that era than to nuclear explosion.
Although the instinct of authority, backed by established interests such as the publishing houses, is to stick their fingers in the disintegrating dikes of control by way of legislative amendment, they too are likely to be forced in time to give way to the deluge of information offered by the Net. But if the copyright system is to be dumped, what will replace it as a mechanism by which authorship can be rewarded and thus encouraged? One possible answer may lie in the old tradition of patronage as refined in the modern practice of sponsorship. After all, what is commercial sponsorship but an update of the system by which artistic endeavour was subsidised and rewarded before copyright – princes replaced by corporations and royal whims and pretensions by the (supposed) certainties of market research. Sponsorship on top of performance and appearance fees has shown its capacity to sustain sports and hugely enrich individual sportsmen. Why not writers, artists and composers? If a multinational high-tech company is prepared to fork out millions to identify the corporate image with the success of a premier division soccer team – and television to watch them go through their paces a- splash with corporate logos and encircled by hoarding boards – why not a squad of Nobel Prize winners in literature who earn peanuts by comparison? There will, of course, be complaints from traditionalists, of money-lenders invading the temples of artistic integrity. But we have come to accept the markets are Caesar, so why not let the markets rule?
Incidentally, by way of footnote to the above history of copyright, I am indebted to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is freely available and copyable on the Internet and as a result constitutes one of my favourite sites. This is in sharp contrast to that other great reference book of the last century, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). If one wishes to consult the OED via the Net an admission fee of 530 is demanded in the form of an annual subscription. That is nearly what I paid a few years ago for one of my most precious possessions, a leather-bound, two-volume, 2nd edition of that more worthy, if less wordy predecessor to the OED, Samuel Johnson’s English Dictionary. If one surfs over from the Oxford dictionary’s heavily guarded doors to the premises on the Net of its chief rival, Webster’s (no charge) and enters “OED” on its search form it will throw up as first choice the acronym for “Offer Expiration Date”. Which, if the OED persists in it present course, offers what strikes me as a reasonable piece of divination.