Well Comm

What Shakespeare wouldn’t have done for copyright

Posted by admin on November 17th, 2009 — Posted in Uncategorized

Photo by Ioan Sameli

No one can doubt that the internet allows us to use information in new ways. Today anyone can use a computer to change images and speech, as Larry Lessig points out in “How Creativity Is Being Strangled by the Law.” But even though we’re becoming a society of content mixers and mashers, we need to remember how difficult it is to create good original content in the first place.

Writers, musicians, photographers and other artists make great investments of time and money, and often undergo personal sacrifices to produce their work. To provide these artists with a market place in which to earn a living, laws pertaining to copyright and trademark need to be enforced worldwide.

Imagine no copyright

What if there were no copyright laws? Imagine how difficult it would be for a great writer to earn the profit he deserves from his work. Take the greatest writer of all, Shakespeare, for example.

William Shakespeare, bard and theft victim

“Under the laws of his day, once his company had performed one of his plays, Shakespeare lost the legal ability to prevent further performance by anyone else,” writes Peter Givler, Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses. “All he could do to control performance rights, as it were, was to keep the acting script, or prompt book, under lock and key. Since his plays were popular, a brisk business sprang up in counterfeit manuscripts, produced by actors from memory, or by scribes in the audience who took notes, that were sold to rival companies and performed as plays by–who else?–William Shakespeare.”

To this day, we still don’t know which of the many versions of Hamlet is the one actually written by Shakespeare because of all the counterfeits, says Givler.

Fortunately the copyright laws of today protect against such theft, or at least they’re supposed to. For a writer, his reputation and career depend on being recognized as the original creator of a certain work.

Recovering costs from the market place

Apparently this one never went by corporate branding for approval. Photo by Aaron Gustafson.

Givler also explains that copyright “creates the basic legal mechanism that allows publishing costs to be recovered from the marketplace.” When you consider everything that goes into publishing a book, for example, from the editing and rewriting to the merchandising and promotion, the cost can be enormous. Before copyright, an author needed generous sponsors or patrons if he himself was not wealthy enough to fund a book’s publication. Without today’s marketplace, publishers would be unable to produce the array of titles that readers can choose from.

But what about artists who collaborate and create just for the joy of the process? They could not care less about copyright, trademark or the economic potential of their projects. This is refreshing, and their work certainly can be as good as any copyrighted material, that’s for sure. But I would argue that it’s very difficult for artists who collaborate for free to meet the public’s demand for content in the same way that the film, music and publishing industries can. After all, these industries invest millions of dollars in the process. And I think they have a right to protect the works that they have financed.

Copyright provides diversity of expression

Certainly the mashing up of copyrighted material can lead to greater diversity of creative expression. Think of the music videos in “How creativity is being strangled by the law,” which still stick in my head days after viewing them. But with the internet and all the other communication media available to us, the diversity of expression in copyrighted material is ample in and of itself.

“If all you care about is poetry from landed gentry or home videos or open source software from IBM engineers (largely funded, ironically, by patent royalties), copyright is not so important,” says law professor Justin Hughes in a debate about copyright published in The Economist. “But if you care about films targeted (and financed) for the African-American and gay communities, copyright matters more. If your image of cultural production is white men in ivory tower offices writing scholarly tracts, copyright seems of not much relevance. If your image is that of a musician or screenwriter waiting tables and still looking for a record deal or film financing, copyright matters more.”

Copyright and trademark gets personal

Copyright, and especially trademark, have taken on a personal meaning for me as part of my work on our final website project, www.snacktivitymom.com. My wife, Deb, is the “Snacktivity Mom,” who created the dozen or so SnacktivitiesTM that will appear on the site. I’ve seen how much time and care she and my kids have put into developing each one of the items, from the “Sweet and Salty Porcupine” and “Hot Lava Volcano” to the “Guacamole Sea Turtle” and the “Monkey Juice.”

I know it sounds quaint, and we’re not exactly talking about vast sums of capital, but my family’s investment of time and care means a lot. And I’d hate to see these ideas stolen by someone else who thinks they’d be cute items to post on their website, or some corporation who thinks Snacktivities would be a great way to market their food products.

That’s why we have trademarked the name, and are planning to copyright the “creative expression” of each Snacktivity (you can’t copyright an actual recipe, we‘ve learned).

Hopefully copyright and trademark protection will provide the economic engine that drives the distribution, and ultimate success, of Snacktivities. I believe that’s how these laws were meant to work.

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