Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

was the right of inheritance of a copyright that vexed him. Throughout his famous speech he asserts that the cost to the public finds no balance whatsoever in any benefits to the copyright holder, who, by definition in this case, is dead. This is the source of his otherwise inexplicable claim that Johnson would prefer twopence rather than (according to the terms of the bill then under consideration) an extension after his death of sixty years.

Instead of saying, like a simpleton, that nothing matters to someone after he is dead, Macaulay, who certainly was aware of man’s ability to plan, project, and sacrifice, puts a sophisticated gloss on it: “We all know how faintly we are affected by the prospect of very distant advantages, even when they are advantages which we may reasonably hope that we shall ourselves enjoy. But an advantage that is to be enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody, we know not by whom, perhaps by somebody unborn, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action.”61

Is this why from time immemorial and across all societies people have been so unconcerned about inheritance, and willing to relinquish the prospect? Macaulay’s claim is disproved only by the structure of the society in which he lived, and those throughout almost all the world at almost all times; by the actions and motives of aristocracy; by inheritance; by concern for the extension of one’s line; and by the millions who sacrificed their lives to build nations, protect tribes and ethnicities, accumulate wealth, and advance every conceivable cause and belief—all beyond the span of their natural lives. What of someone who reduces his “carbon footprint” in the belief that it will benefit people with no connection to him whatsoever, hundreds of years from now? How “faintly” is he “affected by the prospect of very distant advantages”? I cannot believe that because Macaulay had neither wife nor child he would be numb to mankind’s universal concern for future generations, especially one’s descendants, especially, if we are considering the term he disapproved, one’s own children and grandchildren. For whatever reason, his argument is not even strong enough to be characterized as weak.

Perhaps sensing its vulnerability, he attempts to fortify his claim in yet another peculiar foray. Who would benefit if Johnson’s copyright outlived him? According to Macaulay, “It would have been some bookseller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black Frank, the doctor’s servant and residuary legatee.”62 This is the passage that stimulated the hissy fit about the shin of beef.

It posits four different owners in fifty-six years, a new one every fourteen years. Despite Macaulay’s inexplicable declaration that, “It is…highly unlikely that it [copyright] will descend during sixty years or half that term [that is, thirty years] from parent to child,”63 it seems in fact very likely that it would, and that even in the case of a man who died childless such ping-ponging would be unusual. But, take even the case of Johnson. According to Macaulay, he would have derived no benefit from the ability to pass on to someone else or others the extension of his copyright. But what about Black Frank, or Milton’s impoverished granddaughter for whom Johnson had written a prologue, or any of Johnson’s many “waifs”? Which would he rather have had, twopence, or the satisfaction of knowing that people he loved or wished to help would benefit from what he left behind? What if he, quite apart from benefiting his families, wanted to bequeath to a church, an orphanage, or a hospital? If the copyright were of any value, he could so direct it.

In the absence of copyright, as copyright and copyright-extension opponents so often point out—inaccurately, as we shall see—there is a diffuse and general public benefit in the potential of lower-priced editions. But even were it greater than it is in fact, by what right can anyone claim to dictate to another not only the choice of his charities, but that he can’t choose at all, and must see his work spread upon the wind like dandelion seed? Perhaps Samuel Johnson thought, and desired deeply with his heart, that the best use of what he had done would be to direct the revenues from it to a children’s hospital, or a library, or a poorhouse. We all make such choices in our setting of priorities and devotion to causes and principles. Who has the moral right to tell us that we cannot? Macaulay would claim that the easier availability of Johnson’s works is more important than, for instance, taking a child off the streets in eighteenth-century London. Where is the justice of that claim, especially since it is possible that Johnson himself would disagree, that the work was Johnson’s, and that had he owned a brewery instead of a copyright no one would have thought to interfere in his choice.

Back to Black Frank and Milton’s impoverished granddaughter, the latter who, Macaulay claims, was impoverished—despite the perpetual copyright that existed in Milton’s time, and had survived in a patchwork of conflicting claims and rulings well into the eighteenth century—because the rights to Paradise Lost had fallen into the hands of a bookseller. She would hardly have been in a better position had copyright not lasted beyond Milton’s death. That despite perpetual copyright she was impoverished was due to a decision taken by one of her predecessors. If Milton’s descendants chose to sell the copyright, of course they could not continue to benefit from it except from whatever use they might make of the proceeds of sale. The decision was theirs. All wealth, property, and patrimony is subject to risk. Just as any other assets that are bequeathed are subject to growth, erosion, or annihilation, so is a copyright, and so it was then.

Which leads us again to Black Frank, who also would have had a choice. Sell the copyright