On Copyright

Rarely a day goes by on the webernets when someone isn't either decrying DRM, announcing a new form of DRM or demanding more DRM. But DRM is really just a method of trying to enforce copyright.

Earlier this week Steve Jobs wrote an essay slamming DRM and professing a wish to get rid of it, which got me thinking that really there is no way to get rid of DRM without making some radical changes to U.S. copyright law.

Jonathan Lethem, author the novel Motherless Brooklyn, had one of the best essays I've ever read on the subject of copyright in the last issue of Harpers Magazine. The article, entitled The Ecstasy of Influence, is now online and, while I admit it's quite long, I encourage you to read it through to the end, because at the end you'll discover something — most of what Lethem writes is borrowed, copied and re-appropriated from other texts.

Even the authorial “I” of the article is often not the “I” of Lethem himself, but that of other authors ranging from Lawrence Lessig to David Foster Wallace. Not only does Lethem make an incredibly cohesive, well-reasoned argument for a more open copyright system, but he does so using the very methods and results he's advocating.

Lethem does it partly as an astute act of artistry and partly to prove a point — nothing is created in a vacuum. Here's a clip that illustrates why Lethem is concerned about overly restrictive copyright:

If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones???more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths???The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

I'm something of a copyright nut, the first thing I did while playing with Yahoo's new Pipes tool was try to create a mashup of newsfeeds that just track the word copyright. Unfortunately the site went down before I could get it set up, but when I do I'll add a link to the bottom of this article if anyone is interested. My personal feeling on copyright is nicely summed up by Woodie Guthrie:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.

Lethem, along with Mike Doughty, Mark Hosler, and Siva Vaidhyanathan were also on PRI's Open Source Radio last night to talk about issues of copyright. The broadcast repeats much of the article but is still a marvelous listen and it's available online (mp3).

During the broadcast Siva Vaidhyanathan, Associate Professor of Culture and Communication, New York University, raises an interesting point:

What we think of as open source is basically culture, it's how human beings have organized themselves, communicated with each other, joined each other, forged identities and most importantly grooved and danced for centuries. This is basically how people have always dealt with each other. It's just in recent years that we've imposed these interesting cages, legal cages, psychological cages, ethical cages around this level of sharing.

…

Why do we need a term like open source? Why do we need a term to apply to cultural production and distribution? Why do we need a term like open source to apply to software? The reason is that in just the last twenty or thirty years we've seen the rise of a completely different model of cultural distribution, what I call the proprietary model.

[Note that in the broadcast the second paragraph of that quote actually comes first, but I swapped them for clarity sake.]

The suggestion here is not that copyright should be abolished, but that it was working just fine before Disney and Sonny Bono got hold of it. Of course the ultimate irony is that almost nothing Disney has ever done is even remotely original.

I find it telling that the people most concerned with copyright protection are not the creators but the distribution companies hoping to make money from someone else's creation. For instance I don't really care if you take this article and remix it, cut it, or use it creatively as you see fit, but I can't say for sure that Conde Nast feels the same way.

I think copyright will continue to be an even bigger issue as more and more forms of media come into the online and digital age (movie downloads, digital books, et al.) and I'm interested in hearing what Wired readers think about these issue. Feel free to leave your thoughts in comments below.