Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act almost tripling within seven years.77 In 1998, Peru (that is, Peru) published three times as many books as did England in 1825.78 What might Macaulay think of the fact that, a century and a half after he spoke, the southern half of the Korean peninsula saw the publication of 30,500 books?79 Or that Spain, sun-drenched, primitive, bone-dry Spain, published nearly 50,000 books, 170 newspapers, and 2,000 periodicals?80

In 1851, the Library of Congress held 55,000 volumes, far fewer than a Barnes & Noble Superstore. Five years beforehand, it had been directed by law to receive one of each copyrighted “book, map, chart, musical composition, print, cut, or engraving.” By 1992, its collection comprised more than a hundred million such items, including fifteen million books. But this is by no means the overflowing predicate to Macaulay’s major subject, for the predicate would be enlarged if the Library did not shunt most works on medicine and agriculture to the national libraries established in these fields. And it would be further immensely enlarged were the Library required to keep each copyrighted work it receives, which it is not, and therefore does not, though from 1870 to 1909 it did. The scope of what is not represented may be appreciated from the fact that on an average day 31,000 items are delivered to the Library, of which it keeps on average 7,000.81 Though it is thus impossible to determine fully the scale of what former President G.W. Bush would call Macaulay’s “misunderestimation,” even the figures that are the predicate’s minimum might now actually be known to Macaulay, as they might be for him an embarrassment sufficiently intense to wake the dead.

Nor do these data require adjustment or division in light of population growth, economic development, or technological advantage, as the bar of copyright extension imagined by Macaulay and his modern retainers would operate uninfluenced by such changes, such as, for example, a red light will stop (or, as I live in Virginia, I must say should stop) a line of traffic whether it consists of two Model-Ts and a buckboard with sharecroppers and nuns on it, or a thousand Ferraris filled with Welsh supermodels and eurotrash. That is, although one cannot say with absolute certainty that copyright was either necessary to or sufficient for this expansion, or with absolute certainty that the expansion would have been either greater or lesser without copyright, one can say definitely that contrary to Macaulay’s predictions and their repetition by disciples blind to fact, copyright as it strengthened did not prevent an immense efflorescence of publication such as civilization had never before experienced.

Like Marx, Macaulay has been proved wrong by reality and the long and steady development of the facts. And yet, like the Marxists, Macaulay’s parrots continue to repeat every argument as if it had not been disproved by continuously evident actuality—as if facts were only dreams and dreams were facts. And they still imply that if copyright exclusivity is not overturned, the rivers of publication that have issued forth during copyright, will (paradoxically) dry up.

I apologize for not being a lawyer, except that it may allow me to comment sensibly upon the law. There is the law as it is intended, which, granted, can never be perfectly understood and would not submit to flawless interpretation even were it to have originated in one clear mind, much less in hundreds of legislative minds—which is why it is necessary to have lawyers. And there is the law of lawyers: that is, law as it was originally intended but then tortured for the rest of its life like a prisoner in the Château d’If.

To understand the perils faced by each of the laws as it exists for year after year among a million patient, bulldog-like talkers, one need only have had in college a sophomore roommate in his first philosophy course, and who, having been drawn to Bishop Berkeley, informs you that the table at which you are eating does not exist, and, when challenged to pass his hand through it, assures you that his hand does not exist, and then must be silent when informed that a hand that does not exist should be able quite easily to pass through a table that does not exist.

In a very short time he is cured of this—unless he goes to law school. If he does, he will first learn the lawyer’s prayer—“God grant that I shall be superficially mauled by an alligator at the Snow White Breakfast at Disney World”—and then spend a large portion of the rest of his life arguing in excruciating detail that this or that thing must be treated as if it does not actually exist, or, if it does not in fact exist, as if it does. Supposedly to protect innocent persons from the criminal abuse of the law by its agents, the policeman is not held to account for his errors or abuse; rather, the mass murderer is set free, presumably to change the policeman’s ways, but what does the policeman care, especially if he himself is lawless, corrupt, and escapes punishment? A contract is deemed unenforceable because a judge agrees with his intoxicating and bosomy clerk that the provision, “$100,000 shall be allocated for the purchase of safety equipment,” does not mean that said $100,000, or any part of it, need actually be spent for safety equipment. Rather, these dollars have the privilege of being hypothetically corralled, not necessarily in a vault or even a separate account but solely in the exercise of a mind or two, there to be forgotten, or perhaps to be spent by Bishop Berkeley. People who enjoy a specialty power often forget that it has been granted to them by a dog that does not want to be wagged by its tail, no matter how caught up in hypotheticals the tail may have become.

The law is imperfect, we are imperfect, this is the system we have and that we must struggle forever to balance judiciously.