McCaulay, 1841

[eyelessgame]

The advantages arising from a system of copyright are obvious. It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books; we cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated; and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright. You cannot depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives... It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.

There have been times in which men of letters looked, not to the public, but to the government, or to a few great men, for the reward of their exertions... I can conceive no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of ministers and nobles. I can conceive no system more certain to turn those minds which are formed by nature to be the blessings and ornaments of our species into public scandals and pests.

We have, then, only one resource left. We must betake ourselves to copyright, be the inconveniences of copyright what they may.

He goes on to oppose, rightly, the extension of copyright many years after the author's demise. But for those who think copyright is "just wrong", that's the straightforward and correct response.

Comments

True

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Copyrights, and their cousin the patent, have been horribly abused by a few corporations, which engenders such ill-will, but yeah, it's really a necessary system for the vast majority of creative individuals.

Interestingly, I have seen patronage at work a little bit in the open source software industry. The Perl Foundation is a non-profit that funds individuals like Larry Wall and others to work on developing the perl language. Donations largely come from users of perl, individuals and companies, that want this work. And since they're getting paid this way, they can work full time on perl and still release it without any copyright or patent restrictions.

I could conceive of something similar for authors, but truthfully, there's a lot more value in freely distributable software than there is in novels. But if people really want someone to write a public domain novel, and can collect enough money to make it worth the author's trouble, it's not like there's a thing in the world stopping them.

Re: True

[dtm]

There's also the point that while there's value in someone who can customize a certain piece of software to the picky details of your business, value that businesses will pay for, there is less value in someone who can customize a book to be about a particular person. (Amazingly egotistical billionaires aside)

Therefore, copyright is less of an absolute, sine qua non necessity for software professionals than it is for authors.

Note that even the GNU project - to mention an organization often accused of thinking that copyright is "just wrong" - recognizes this difference. (Which is almost certainly why there's continued friction between Debian and GNU over the GFDL - the Gnu Free Documentation License.)

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

This has, of course, been discussed at more length than you can shake a lawyer at, on Making Light. The conclusion seemed to be that yes, copyright is better than no copyright, but it's important to remember that copyright itself is a social ill, and should be used only to the extent that the social goods it promotes outweigh it.