The Village Green

The New York Times published an opinion piece by Mark Helprin entitled “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” In the article the author presents a well written piece favoring the granting of copyright ownership forever and likens the current situation where original ownership expires after a set amount of time to theft without precedence in any other segment of society.

A few of his arguments are thinly veiled straw men, where the authorship of a book or an invention is compared to a department store or property owner. The former can resell his work any number of times, while the latter only once per item. At times the author seems to even contradict his own position by evoking the founding fathers who established limitations to copyright, and then claiming that if they had only known one could make a living by writing or inventing surely would have protected their inventiveness by giving the first one to express an idea to forever own that expression.

He does make a good point that ideas are not at issue, that ideas are not copyrighted. But any invention is built upon the foundational ideas of those who came before. This is true for the creative arts as well. In the case of the author himself, he is credited with being the author of “Winter’s Tale” which last time I checked was the title of a play by a rather famous author. Under the rules that Mr. Helprin proposes, he could never have written anything that had already been written or brings to mind the works of another author by using the same words earlier written, and should turn over his profits to the descendants of the original author.

Imagine for a moment all of the opportunities that theater groups would be denied by being restricted from performing A Christmas Carol. The words and images of those winter visitations are a part of the fabric of our society and help shape new authors not because it is still owned by the estate of Charles Dickens, but because it belongs to all of us as part of the public domain. Expand that to a world where every idea is owned only by the first to bring it to publication and you quickly reduce an innovative and creative modern world to the slow pace of a snail. While the idea itself is not at issue, the propagation of an idea needs a vehicle, and publishing in its many forms, is the best, most effective way of sharing that idea with others. Some ideas are too important to limit to only the small class that can purchase them.

Of course, that’s just my opinion. Where do you stand? Read the article and take your own stand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/opinion/20helprin.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2