Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

so kindly? At least to begin with, I would ease in without controversy, even if it meant abandoning longstanding habits. The next time, perhaps, I would formulate something that would generate hundreds of bilious letters, but not now.

I searched my memory and notes for something innocuous. I would choose a topic close to my heart but distant from the fire of partisanship, of which I remain thoroughly sick. Copyright! Except for Hollywood lawyers, who are not even human, who thinks about copyrights other than the few who hold them? Who really cares, or knows even the most elemental facts? I worried only about putting my audience to sleep, and thought of my potential readers as stones skipping unconsciously over a lake, my copyright piece being the lake. Still, this was perfectly consonant with my new life, and a step on the inevitable road to oblivion: gradual, tranquil, gentle, and somnolent. Though I regretted that only one or two people might notice, at least I was sure that I could not possibly anger anyone.

And yet it was a subject I could not dismiss if only because it had engaged a passion fueled by the existence of an inequity. Years before, in making my will, I had to accept that the bulk of what I would leave to my children, the product of a lifetime’s work, would after not too long a time simply expire and flow from their hands into the hands of others. Had I built a business, a farm, or a law firm instead of a series of copyrights, this would not be so. It seemed, as simply as I can put it, unfair.

“What if,” asked the piece, which, in the form that follows, would run also in the Claremont Review of Books, “after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during its life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the state would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society…to houses. Or to businesses. Were you to have ushered through the many gates of taxation a flour mill, travel agency, or newspaper, they would not suffer total confiscation.”

Here, I was inexact. Nothing is confiscated, but after it is, in fact, commandeered by the government, which moves it from the state of being protected to the state of being without protection, it is thrown open to the use of all. This is not the case with “many classes of assets abstract or concrete, from land to Treasury bills to stocks, paintings, and much else; once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants, and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

“That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I to write the great American novel tomorrow (again?), seventy years from my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren. To the objection that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where the inheritors of Sylvia Plath berth their 200-foot yachts. And, second, why, when such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart, it is brought to bear against legions of harmless drudges who other than a handful of literary plutocrats (manufacturers, really) are destined by the nature of things to be no more financially secure than a seal in the Central Park Zoo.”

This was not, however, merely a rhetorical question: “The answer is that the Constitution states unambiguously that Congress shall have the power ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.’ The italics are mine, the capitalization James Madison’s.

“It is, then, for the public good. But it might also be for the public good were Congress to allow the enslavement of foreign captives and their descendants (this was tried), the seizure of Bill Gates’s bankbook, or the ruthless suppression of Alec Baldwin. You can always make a case for the public interest if you are willing to exclude from common equity those whose rights you seek to abridge. But we don’t operate that way, mostly.”

I then went on to point out, in some detail, how freeing a work into the public domain offers only a fractional economic advantage to the purchaser and the publisher, while depriving of any interest in it whatsoever both its author and his heirs; and next dealt with the argument that, as the copyright holder is dependent entirely upon the government for his exclusivity of right, does not then the government’s giveth support its taketh?

“By that logic, should the classes of property not subject to total confiscation therefore be denied the protection of regulatory agencies, courts, police, and the law itself lest they be subject to expropriation as payment for the considerable and necessary protections they too enjoy? Should automobile manufacturers be nationalized after 70 years because they depend on publicly financed roads? Should Goldman Sachs be impounded because of the existence of the SEC?”

Why would the Framers, whose political genius has never been exceeded, have countenanced such an unfair exception? After all, “Jefferson objected that ideas are, ‘like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and, like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.’ But ideas are immaterial to the question of copyright. Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the “Soave sia il vento” and “Kentucky Woman.” We have different words for art and idea because they are two different things. The flow