[overflow] Re: Copyrights (by way of Tom Smith got his wish...)

[Lee Gold <leeway@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michelle & Boyd Bottorff wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to decide what I actually THINK about copyright as a natural
> right and the "authorial rights" bit, and money keeps tangling up in it.
> What if we eliminated money.  What would be the "natural rights" of a
> creator to his creations in a mythical society where one's every need
> was already provided for?

My own take on the subject is that it should be assumed that people 
want to have their stuff published and be paid for it unless it's
proven otherwise, so if you can't trace an author, you should be
able to publish and put the money aside for himer or hiser heirs
or assigns when they turn up.  The law's insisting on positive 
consent has wrecked my ability to reprint some wonderful stuff 
whose authors disappeared and may be dead decades ago.

The natural right of a creator to his creation is not generally
conceded.  Even current law says copyrights do eventually expire.
Standard folk custom was that you had no right to keep other
people from changing your words or melodies, reusing your 
melody with other words, reusing your words with another melody.
You did have the right to be remembered by people who knew you
as the writer, and not be credited with someone else's changed
version of your stuff or have your stuff miscredited to someone
else.  But standard folk custom didn't recognize commercial use
of creations.  

I don't think capitalism is part of nature (though I do welcome it
as a way of enriching a culture).  And I think that adding profits
to the picture, plus the right to trade your right to profit from
your creation in return for money, complicates things a lot.  

Personally, I'd have a sliding scale for copyright according to how 
much money was being made from the creation.  Maybe a year for each 
$X, with X equalling the cost of mid-size car or 3000 paperbacks or
some such, so that a filksong would stay in copyright far shorter
than a blockbuster movie.  

I suspect that your feeling that it's impolite to hand songs around
or change them indicates you're not thinking of filk as part of
folksong but rather as part of commercial pop music, in which even
an arrangement can be copyrighted.  What are your feelings on recipes, 
and does it make a different if you got them out of a cookbook
or from an elderly relative?  Do you have a right to pass them on
without checking with the author?  To change the ingredients?


--Lee