indessed roscivs

I’m ambivalent on the topic of copyright. Not on its current length, of course—I believe the Founding Fathers meant it when they said “limited Times“. I think in today’s fast-paced world, anything past twenty or thirty years would be way beyond the maximum benefit to society.

What I’m conflicted on is where that optimal length lies. At times, I’m tempted to say zero—people are creative animals, and will produce creative works even without guaranteed compensation (I certainly do). And even then, there are many ways to guarantee an income even without copyright (such as the kind of creative work I am employed to do).

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

But then I think of Isaac Asimov, one of my favorite authors, and certainly the most prolific. I cannot deny that he probably would have been less prolific had the copyright terms of his day not existed, providing him with a near-constant stream of steady income from a very young age, leaving him free to do what he enjoyed—that is to say, write.

Perhaps he would have even ended up as a chemist at a university, only occasionally writing bits of fiction here and there. Which of his works would I give up for a shorter copyright term? Would I sacrifice his Foundation series to the gods of the public domain? His autobiographies? Murder at the ABA? My heart shudders to think of giving up even the most mundane of his titles.

But then I think of the flip side of the coin. How many creative works do we daily give up because of copyright’s restrictive terms? I learned just recently that David Bowie, back in the 70s, had planned to write a musical based on Orwell’s 1984, but abandoned the idea “after encountering difficulties in licensing the novel”. A David Bowie musical 1984! The mere thought of it excites me at its potential. And yet it is lost forever—a still-born idea, stolen from the wisps of time by the cruel mistress of copyright.

Where does the optimal point lie? Is it somewhere in the middle, taking a bit of life from both Asimov and Bowie? Is it closer to one extreme? Is it closer to what’s familiar and old, or is it something radical and revolutionary? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.