This weekend marks the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, the first modern copyright law. Understanding that the original intent of copyright law in the U.S. was to foster creativity, how do we think today’s copyright terms — life of the author +70 years — will help a dead person produce new creative works?
We’re always talking about how this or that program impoverishes our children. Well what about impoverishing them by holding creative works from the public domain? Or criminalizing remix culture? From an essay Cory Doctorow wrote to commemorate this 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne:
Walk the streets of Florence and you’ll find a ‘David’ on every corner: because for half a millennium, Florentine sculptors have learned their trade by copying (but try to take a picture of ‘David’ on his plinth and you’ll be tossed out by a security guard who wants to end this great tradition in order to encourage you to buy a penny postcard).
I learned to write by copying. In 1977, when I was six, my father took me to ‘Star Wars’. I couldn’t figure out how a made-up story could be so exciting, so I went home, stapled some paper together and trimmed it to book size, and wrote out the story as best I remembered it, doing it over and over again as I strove to unpick it.
Today, I earn my living by copying: taking ideas that excite me and combining them in ways that are mine, but never wholly mine.
Against Monopoly’s Meera Nair picks some highlights from the Statute of Anne:
For instance, if books were perceived as overpriced, any individual could make a complaint to the authorities (among them the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Court, the Vice-Chancellors of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge). Booksellers and printers could be summoned to justify the “reason of dearness.” If the price was found to be excessive, the authorities could, “limit and settle the price for every such printed book.”
And for each book printed, “nine copies upon the best paper,” were to be reserved for “the Royal Library, the Libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Libraries of the Four Universities in Scotland, the Library of Sion College in London, and the Library commonly called the Library belonging to the Faculty of Advocates at Edinburgh.” If delivery of books did not take place within ten days after receiving a demand from a library, the offender was fined five pounds (per book).
The notion of copyright law impoverishing future generations struck me as I listened to On The Media interviewing Duke Law School professor James Boyle on how modern copyright law has strayed far from The Statute of Anne’s original intent.
RELATED: Cornell’s is an excellent reference on Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States.
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