Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

highly influential in American life and letters and will become more so in the future as the generations educated in and addicted to this fashion rise to take their place, the following capsule tour is illustrative in showing how faulted process alone can divert a potentially productive argument into a nightmarish swamp of fractional thoughts.

“If Mark Twain’s copyrights were still valid,” we are told on nytimes. com, “his works could not be taught in schools because of the prohibitive cost.”35 This carefully considered assertion is decisively proved by the fact that at present and since the founding of the republic no copyrighted works are now or have been taught in schools, and explains why today’s students cannot read Maya Angelou and Salman Rushdie, whose works are copyrighted, and are burdened instead with Melville and Emily Dickinson, whose works are not. It is a tyrannical cultural imbalance, a holocaust of sorts, perpetuated by the twisted logic of copyright. Not only that, but the same injustice that forces copyrighted works into oblivion is also responsible for “forcing works by Shakespeare and Mozart out of print to make room for new work…a culturally shortsighted strategy at best.”36

The reason that the economic consequences of copyright both discourage and encourage out-of-copyright works while at the same time they discourage and encourage copyrighted works, and the reason the effect of such a process is so clearly damaging is not because of some failing by the enthusiastic authors of these statements, but because, obviously, the universe is confused. Were the universe, like them, aware of certain prime economic relations, such as, “If you sell it, its [sic] no longer art,”37 and, “‘Property’ is a relationship between freely-conversing individuals,”38 presumably it would no longer be so addled. Admittedly, it might find great difficulty in wrapping its galaxies around the idea of property as a relationship between freely conversing individuals, but with infinite time it might come to understand.

Even if many of these people may have suffered terrible traumas or be regular users of hallucinogenic drugs, their ringleaders are ensconced in prestigious universities, and these eminences (who are sometimes referred to reverentially and without irony as “himself,” as if the person so impressed had touched the hand of Obama) are intelligent, qualified, and well-schooled—it is presumed. Here is “himself” in his “blog”: “On the Helprin reply: Wow. So I posted the entry calling on people to write a reply to the Helprin piece, and then got on a plane in Boston. When I landed in Frankfurt, I got an e-mail: ‘Wow! Pretty amazing wiki article.’ And indeed it was (and is)…. I would have focused the attack in much the same way.”39 Why does this remind me of Idi Amin? I shall send people like this a bouquet in the next chapter, but since they approach this argument with the broad scope of the French encyclopedists, bringing in almost anything and everything in support of their cause, they have made themselves game in more respects than one.

A certain Professor Boyle, in either a tired technique of opprobrium or an intemperate fit of pique, mentioned my name eleven times in a very short article. I don’t believe in ad hominem attacks unless—and sometimes not even then—the target is the holder of collective or coercive power so great that his efforts are magnified and his hide made so thick that the only way to pierce it is with an oversharp arrow. In this case, however, various options remain open, although one must be civil even to crapulous professors. I don’t know how thick is his professorial hide, but something is thick enough so that a foray into the economics of publishing has led him to state that, “over 90% of works are no longer commercially available 20 years after their publication,” and that my proposal in the New York Times (which he did not accurately perceive) would “extend this cultural disaster to infinity.”40

Under current law, copyright continues for seventy years beyond the death of the author. Were I to die tomorrow, my first copyright would at its expiration have existed for 109 years. If I somehow live to a hundred (which, given the annoyance to which I have lately been subjected, I doubt) it will have continued for 149 years. I don’t know the actuarial averages for writers or the median ages at which they produce their works, but in this particular refutation one can afford to tie one’s hands behind one’s back a little. Let us say for the professor’s sake that the typical author dies the day after producing his only work, which we may hypothetically and appropriately call Hapax Legomenon. Thus, we have seventy years of protection by copyright.

If indeed it is true that nine of ten works “are no longer commercially available 20 years after their publication” (not even in used bookstores? not even on Amazon?), by which he may mean “out of print,” something quite different, how can this possibly be an effect of a copyright that, at a minimum, provides half a century more of protection? Is the argument that books that go into print while copyrighted and stay in print for twenty years while copyrighted go out of print because they are copyrighted? What magic influence comes into play to convert a condition that does not hinder publication or however many years of commercial availability into a condition that then has the opposite effect? The fact of books “disappearing” is not caused by the existence of copyright—as the vigorous sale of copyrighted books might suggest. That is, it must be something other than copyright that causes books to go out of print. Such as, Professor Boyle, absence of demand?

The fact that books go out of print is advanced as a reason for restricting or ending copyright. Saying that if something goes out of print it should move into the public domain is equivalent to saying that if a business has a loss in one of its divisions, the assets of that division should be