William Wordsworth's letter: "The Law of Copyright" (1838)
gutenberg.org
gutenberg.org
Per Wordsworth, Talfourd said (and Wordsworth agreed) that English common law had acknowledged perpetual heritable and transferable copyright.
What period of history is that talking about? Before the Licensing of the Press Act 1662? Before the Statute of Anne (1710)? Before the Copyright Act 1814? And is it talking about the sort of thing now called moral rights, or authors’ rights?
Because from what I’ve ever read, it didn’t sound like there was really anything in the way of copyright, no intellectual property law. If you had a manuscript, you could do what you wanted with it, including copying it.
Of course, the printing press upset that balance, by making mass duplication practical, and so ultimately something had to be done. I’m sure there was more depth to the arguments than I can perceive now, but in desiring to go back to perpetual heritable and transferable copyright, it feels like Wordsworth was hankering for an era that was no longer realistic, due to technological development.
We’ve seen a reflection of this issue in the last thirty years, as the cost of mass duplication of digital artefacts has again plummeted, this time to essentially nil.
The genie is out of the bottle.
I’d be curious to know how mainstream among authors Wordsworth’s feeling of perpetual heritable and transferable copyright being a right was.
I wonder how he’d react if he saw what copyright has become. Maybe where it’s ended up isn’t quite what he had in mind. I don’t know. I know nothing of his character or nature.
I do know that I would like the copyright system to be burned to the ground, and go back to something closer to the Statute of Anne. I like this scheme: ten years of free protection, then costing $10 × 1.5ⁿ⁻¹ for each subsequent year—$10, $15, $22.5… you ramp up to a million dollars per year by year 40, so that if it’s actually lucrative you can keep it a bit longer, but otherwise it lapses. Because in practice, copyright is the instrument helping very few people after even ten years.
A compromise between the Statute of Anne and something like original US Copyright would work pretty well.
I also thought this was suspicious, and I believe now that it is just made up.
> In maintaining the claim of authors to this extension, I will not intrude on the time of the House with any discussion on the question of law; whether perpetual copyright had existence by our common law; or of the philosophical question whether the claim to this extent is founded in natural justice. On the first point, it is sufficient for me to repeat what cannot be contradicted, that the existence of the legal right was recognised by a large majority of the judges, with Lord Mansfield at their head, after solemn and repeated argument; and that six to five of the judges only determined that the stringent words "and no longer," in the statute of Anne took that right away.
And a couple of weeks later, Mr. Wakley described <https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1838-05-09/debates/fa3...>:
> Before the Act of Anne, as had been admitted on high legal authority, the copyright was in perpetuity; and what was the effect upon the interests of authors. Allusion had been made to the descendants of Milton; but hon. Gentlemen seemed to have forgotten, that Milton wrote at a period when the copyright was perpetual, yet, with all this protection, he was only able to procure 8l. or 10l. for his "Paradise Lost."
By the sound of it, without reading much further, it was by no means unanimous that copyright was perpetual before the Statute of Anne, but that it was the legal consensus; but also, that what that copyright was, was rather flimsy, so that, if I’m reading it correctly, almost half of a panel of judges didn’t acknowledge that the Statute of Anne had taken something away by declaring “and no longer”. Which sounds to me about the same as denying a meaningful copyright existed.
It’s fun reading some of these sorts of things. You tend to see how little humans have changed.
> The hon. Member for Maidstone had said, that Mr. Southey intended, at one period, to write a history of the monastic orders, which would procure a fame equal to that of Gibbon. With respect to the fame, he must be permitted to express his doubts. Mr. Southey, it appeared, had been deterred from undertaking the work, because he could only enjoy the copyright during his life. It was much to be doubted whether Mr. Southey would have ever carried his intention into effect, if copyright had been as he wished. If the authority of the right hon. Baronet, the Member for Pembroke were to be relied upon, with respect to Mr. Southey, it was very improbable that he would have prosecuted the work. The right hon. Baronet, on one occasion, gave it as his opinion of Mr. Southey, that that Gentleman had so often changed sides, it would be impossible to say what his opinion would be upon any subject at any given time. The right hon. Baronet's opinion upon such a subject was entitled to some weight, as he had himself changed sides. Indeed, literary men were peculiarly fickle, as much so as young girls.
Some beautiful shade being cast there.
Lots of vibe-lawyering if you will.
—⁂—
The printers and publishers have been lobbying to kill your Bill, so someone suggested I and another famous author show our support in a petition to Parliament to pass it, or at least one like it. I guess they asked me because I’m old [he was 68 at the time; he lived to 80], and so my relatives have a more obvious vested interest in extending copyright past my death. I don’t like to get involved in public affairs, and I like to think Parliament is wise enough to see why this Bill should obviously be passed, without us author having to point it out—the printers and publishers, having made their money and respectability from us, now want to squash us. I simply cannot believe that Parliament will be deceived by their very weak arguments. I also don’t want to petition Parliament about this as just one person, because it doesn’t go far enough: I hold that it is the right of all authors, that copyright should be forever. As you said in your speech, English common law used to work that way. So honestly, while they’re complaining about the idea of extending copyright, I want them to explain why we shouldn’t go back to how things were before we limited copyright! It’s obviously on them to show this, but they’re not even trying—they’ve framed the whole discussion relative to how things are now, which was a compromise between no copyright (in publishing something, you give it away completely) and perpetual copyright (inheritable and transferable).
I get that literature isn’t quite the same as other kinds of property. Some people have said it should be treated the same as mechanical inventions and chemistry, but that’s obvious nonsense. I say rights of ownership are more fundamental in literature than other kinds of property.
So: I’m not going to formally petition Parliament. (There were others that should have spoken up, but they haven’t.) I’ll content myself with writing this open letter so others can see what I believe, and understand that we’re with you, Serjeant Talfourd; thanks for helping us out, we do appreciate it. That’s all I wanted to say. I’ve got no arguments or facts to add, I, or my friends Coleridge, Scott, Southey, or others. I can’t say anything to convince people, if they weren’t already convinced by your excellent speech when you introduced the Bill, or which other writers have said in the public journals.
I’m confident your Bill will pass. But even if these printers and publishers win for the moment, justice will win eventually. And in the mean time, all us authors thank you and your assistants for your efforts, for the rest of our lives.
If only there was a way to automatically detect it. It is unfortunate that this won’t be available, it is like a nuclear attack on internet content
On the contrary, he declines to petition Parliament, saying in essence “I have to believe they’re not idiots enough to listen to that ridiculous printer and publisher lobbying”.
He further adds this reason for not petitioning: that he holds it to be authors’ right, and equitable, that copyright be perpetual—this bill doesn’t go as far as he wants.
For those thinking it goes against artists, keep in mind that a lot of art today is simply garbage made only for money. If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art.
The digital world, making it extremely easy to access and copy human knowledge, is an achievement of the human mind. Patreons, or an art world evolving alongside society and other jobs, may be one of the possible natural adaptations to this human achievement. Otherwise we're making the same arguments as Luddites.
For the unrestricted copyright inclined, there are ways to stay in legality, if such inclinations collide, and they are fruitful. You will find that consuming only public domain content will be a plus, not a privation.
Wishing away intellectual property rights after you have stolen the entire Internet for profit, is simply your "get away car".
Regardless of how this ends, the tech industry will be seen for what it is. A den of thieves and will never be forgiven.
Smart people will stop using public repositories for source code. Open source will die. Programming languages will emerge that LLMs dont know anything about and work will continue in private. Bots will be banned.
You cannot win this war.
They very much do. Modern copyright was a direct result of printing.
> Paper was just as easy to copy as an MP
not true
You are using the word stolen to mean "breaching a state granted monopoly".
The tech industry may very well cease to exist as we know it, but the concept of a digital copy is way more powerful. My comment didn't have anything to do with LLMs, and you mentioning that technology points out to a shallow understanding what digital means.
But the proof will lay in history. Any restriction can be easily overcome because of the nature of the digital world. Only a forceful dictatorial state can make effective restrictions (to some extent), and unless one advocates for that, thus effectively banning the technology itself if not only for some privileged users, one has to accept the nature of what humans have discovered: that counting on his finger (digital is from the latin digitus) can replace its analog counterparts in many situations. Has long has you have fingers you can count, unless someone cuts them off.
Eventually we will have to admit that we have created so much wealth that classical work ethics are no longer humane or beneficial to society. It doesn’t mean people don’t work but it means it must at least partially be divorced from sustenance.
Does their support manifest in any tangible way? It's a popular thing for tech people to talk about, but it doesn't seem to be matched by any effort or associated behaviours.
I think that's just a convenient out for folks who are automating jobs away, and whom also have no qualms about hiring offshore vs people around them.
How do artists eat?
It is true: art made only for money is usually not very good. But good art can, does, and should make money.
“Information wants to be free” is another way of saying “labor wants to be free” which means only rent extracting owners of scarce capital and assets get to make a living. Everyone else is a serf with 5G Internet.
If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth.
It literally costs nothing to write and publish short or long-form literature these days. If you want a physical book, the cost is small.
This kind of out of touch "why do they not eat cake?" mentality is a big reason there's such a deep tech backlash right now. Yeah, we can just land six figure jobs no problem, but other fields? Yeah, they should just do it for the passion. They don't need to get paid.
Of course authors have a passion for it. Nobody would get into that field without a passion, and people tend to not get good at anything unless they like it. That doesn't mean they don't deserve to earn anything.
This is just gross.
This is already the case. The expected payout from one of the big five publishers for a novel is about $5,000 to $10,000 with the author never seeing any payments based on royalties. Millions of books are published each year and only thousands are commercially successful. Being successful as somebody writing literature is essentially a lottery. I don't think copyright works as well as everybody seems to think it does.
Very few athletes make pro, so we should stop paying any athletes?
But to be more substantive: I think copyright laws are woefully out of date. First, the have eaten into the commons to an unhealthy degree. As copyright has been extended further and further, we've introduced a "copyright cliff" where works remain under copyright, but have been abandoned by their owner because the payoff just isn't there to make them available. So the public generally has access to very old works, and very modern works, but there' a big hole in the middle, especially for less popular works. Lewis Hyde discusses some aspects of this in his book "Common as Air".
https://lewishyde.com/common-as-air/
In addition to the term of copyright, the way copyright is framed is antiquated - it assumes the presence of physical copies, and a lot of trouble stems from that.
William Patry was at one point of a lawyer for Google, but is more well known in legal circles for "Patry on Copyright", which Berkeley Law describes as:
> Patry on copyright provides an encyclopedic analysis of copyright, placing court opinions and statutes in their real-world context. In addition to enumerating a complete legislative and statutory history for relevant provisions, on pertinent litigation issues, a circuit-by-circuit breakdown is provided. The extensive discussion of remedial, jurisdictional, choice of law, and international issues is unparalleled in other legal work.
Patry wrote another book that I read called "How to Fix Copyright", and he dives into the sort of changes to copyright would help. They are summarized in the book description as:
> The task of policymakers is to remake our copyright laws to fit our times: our copyright laws, based on the eighteenth century concept of physical copies, gatekeepers, and artificial scarcity, must be replaced with laws based on access not ownership of physical goods, creation by the masses and not by the few, and global rather than regional markets. Patry's view is that of a traditionalist who believes in the goals of copyright but insists that laws must match the times rather than fight against the present and the future.
I struggle to think of a time when it was not so.
Da Vinci apprenticed as a painter; that is, he intended to make his living by selling his art for the dreaded "money". Other capitalist fraudsters posing as "artists" included Michaelangelo (who accepted the despised "money" for painting the Sistine Chapel!!!), Rembrandt, Degas, Picasso, and Pollack.
Then there are those charlatans of the art world whose names are forgotten to history, but they certainly accepted money for illustrating the walls of the pyramid passageways, the pages of bibles, and countless portraits of kings and courtesans.
I'm not stating that today technologies don't bring up new questions. But making silly laws that go against the nature of such technologies won't solve them.