Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

in regard to copyright, its abolition, or truncation, now just gaining ground: I’m too old. But underlying my critics’ general aversion to heritability is an apparently personal animus, or, as they elegantly posit: “Who cares about some artist’s stupid relatives? They didn’t think up the idea and we all know how much trust fund kids suck.”14 Lest you think their criticism not uniformly this elegant, consider this from the Atlantic Online: “Did anybody else get the impression that Helprin is espousing this policy because he is certain his works will become beloved classics, and if copyright is extended forever, his ancestors will be wealthy aristocrats?”15 In just a few generations, we have gone from Hazlitt to Betty Boop.

Far more intelligent than this last, as anything could be, was a friend’s challenge expressed to me directly and in a civil and constructive spirit. In regard to my plea for the (partial) equity of copyright ( it cannot be perpetual) and a flour mill or Victoria’s Secret, he asked: “Do you equate what you have written with Victoria’s Secret?”

My answer is, first, yes, in that the qualities of the various properties should be largely irrelevant in the blind eyes of the law, unless we want a kind of Gong-Show judiciary that metes out legal treatment according to criteria of taste. This might be superficially attractive to some, until a judge’s taste proved uncongenial to their own. One man’s red lace brassiere could be another man’s Hamlet, and vice versa. And, second, no, in that I would hope that what I produce is in at least some ways (though perhaps not in utility and certainly not in popularity) superior to what Victoria’s Secret produces (or sells), and therefore not deserving of less protection than, say, a garter belt. And, third, neither, because a more apt and closely aligned comparison would be with a publishing house or a bookstore. The product is exactly the same, although the writer is stage one, the publisher stage two, and the bookstore stage three. Stage three can be passed on in perpetuity to the heirs of the bookstore owner. Stage two can be passed on in perpetuity to the heirs of the publisher (many people are surprised to learn that Harold Macmillan, protégé of Churchill, prime minister, chancellor of the University of Oxford, was heir to the publisher Macmillan). For stage one, upon which stages two and three utterly depend, not. “Ah,” you might say. “The publisher must print and ship, the bookseller open, attend, and sell, whereas when the writer’s work is done all he does is collect royalties.” But neither the publisher nor the bookstore have to build new buildings every year, or make a new good name, or new goodwill, to benefit from the revenues these generate. And if such an argument—that is, that on your figurative bicycle you are disqualified because although you may have pedaled uphill, you have coasted downhill—is valid in regard to book royalties, it should be valid elsewhere, meaning that all classes of ownership, whether stocks, bonds, partnerships, real estate, et cetera, that generate income passively should therefore be subject to the same limitations, which they most certainly are not.

Even were copyright perpetual, the extent of its heritability would be a separate question entirely, governed by the law as it pertains to property in general. Though the widely expressed general objections to heritability are irrelevant to the question, they demand a riposte. Very often, those who object to property itself (copyright being a particular form of property) do so in the belief that by exhibiting their “unselfishness” they achieve a certain moral superiority. In theory, at least, they are willing to sacrifice for the common good, though more often than not the level at which they would recommend confiscation in whole or in part rests just above the point to which their own assets have risen. Their argument is that society benefits if all infants start from the same position.

But if, for example, your infant has cerebral palsy and needs as much care as money can buy for the rest of his life, and you are willing to work yourself to the bone and do without to provide for him, tough. This is trumped by the belief that the state should take care of all such people—whether it does or not—and that if in fact it does, as it does not necessarily, you have no right to supplement his care if that would mean the affront of dying and leaving behind, if it exceeds a certain amount, the money for which you have labored and sacrificed. These are the workings of statist compassion: the idea as applied to the collective always trumps the individual person. Thus, it is possible, in pursuit of the “principle” that all children should have milk, self-righteously to create conditions in which no children have milk. With collectivism, it’s the thought that counts.

What law, in what system, would obstruct the most natural thing in the world—the desire to help one’s children, and their children, through the trials and difficulties of life? Only envy could engender the view that one person’s good fortune in this regard is another’s deprivation. In a city of houses and shacks, justice is not tearing down houses but replacing shacks with houses newly built. Further, if educating and providing for future generations is a worthy and stabilizing goal for the state, why is it not so for an individual, especially when, as the history of the twentieth century has shown, individual action is generally more successful and efficient than state planning?

Then there is the matter of actual justice. Consider the case of two families, one that eats sparingly and cheaply at home, forgoes entertainment and vacations, knows no luxuries, and keeps the family store open eighteen hours a day; and another that drinks, gambles, vacations, borrows, spends beyond its means, works intermittently or not at all, and indulges itself with debt for which, when relieved by bankruptcy, everyone else becomes partially responsible.