Your Place In Copyright:A Graduate Student’s Guide

Lesley Walters

Graduate StudentEducational Communications and TechnologyUniversity of SaskatchewanMay, 2009

Introduction

The general public knows copyright as an obstacle to be negotiated in everyday life. From thephotocopier to the personal computer, most people are aware that they are walking a line thatseparates access to materials and infringement of someone else’s rights. Most of us, however, spendlittle time considering what sort of rights we have over our own creations, and how society and cultureare impacted by the way we exercise those rights. As scholars we create in many ways: by writingpapers, conducting research, and developing tools for instruction. In Canada, and around the world,creation begets copyright. Becoming acquainted with copyright’s history, applications and implicationswill allow you to use your creativity to your best advantage and for the greatest good.

In order to decide how to personally approach issues surrounding the copyrights we hold ascreators of software, or authors of research papers, we should have some understanding of where theconcept of copyright originated, as well as the path it has taken to it’s present form.Finnean of Moville made the long journey from Ireland to Rome in 540 to pick up a copy of anew common translation of the Christian Bible

(Finnian of Moville, 2009). His star pupil, BishopColumba, felt that this book needed to be available to the common folk, so he snuck into Finnian’sstudy over successive nights and hand copied one of the Psalters, recopied it at his home, anddistributed those copies to area priests to use in their liturgy. Finnain found out, and brought hiscomplaint to King Diarmit. The King famously decreed “To every cow its calf, to every book its copy”and, depending on the history book you are reading, Columba was subsequently fined 40 head of cattle or exiled to the island of Iona. By the end of the world’s first copyright dispute, sides had beentaken, a battle ensued, and around 3000 people were killed. This was serious business (Soupl, 2000).Finnean was not the author of the text in question, but he was the wealthy owner of it. The mostimportant form of information to many was religious. At this point in history, information was power

,and

The adage “Knowledge is power” is attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, from

Religious Meditations, Of Heresies

,written in 1597, a millennium after the Finnian /Columba affair.

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power was controlled by wealth. This theme continues into 17

century England, until the trend isreversed with the first formal copyright statue, interestingly spurred on by more issues of access toreligious information.Almost a millennium after the bloody unpleasantness created by those surreptitious hand-copies, Guttenberg invented moveable type, and set the stage for classic struggles over power andmoney. In 1557, Queen Mary I gave a group of printers and bookbinders control over the printingindustry in England, making it illegal to print or publish anything if you were not a member of the guild.The Stationers, as they were called, had the right to burn any unauthorized texts published outsidetheir jurisdiction. Besides creating a comfortable economic oligopoly for the anointed group, it alsoallowed Queen Mary to control information distribution in an attempt to quash the burgeoningProtestant reformation. Even after Queen Mary’s reign, The Stationers retained control over theindustry. Initially, authors were paid for work once, and future royalties were not shared. Near the end of the 17

century, authors were regularly cut out of the profit equation entirely through defaultedcontracts, or treated unfairly through work-for-hire schemes in which the author was paid a small salaryfor writing. The Stationers system eventually fell apart, partially due to a lack of content; writerscouldn’t make a living writing anymore. (Soupl, 2000) (Worshipful Company of Stationers andNewspaper Makers, 2009)Without any regulation, English booksellers faced an influx of cheap texts printed outsideBritain. Besides the economic concerns cause by being cut out of a finely balance vertical integrationscheme, there were major concerns with the material itself. Without oversight by copyright holders, thecontent of texts was at best inconsistent, and at worst inaccurate. One has only to compare a versionof one of William Shakespeare’s plays from the time of his death to one published a few decades later to see how quickly and radically content can be changed.(Doctorow, 2008)In response to years of lobbying surrounding mounting issues of the quality and quantity Britishpublishing, British Parliament enacted The Statute of Anne in 1710. In his book

Rethinking Copyright

,Ronan Deazley (2006) contends, “ The central plank of the Statute of Anne was… a social

quid proquo

. To encourage ‘learned Men to compose and write useful books’” and to that end, provide theauthors, publishers and booksellers finite rights to protect themselves (p. 13). The act also introducedthe concept of public domain, and specified that the author of a work retained control over itspublication and integrity for the first 14 years. Authors were now formally able to negotiate royalties withthe publisher, and their permission had to be sought before reprinting, modifications or citing could takeplace. When that period expired, the work passed into the public domain and “became fair game for civilization to use and disseminate as it saw fit” (Soupl, 2000).If you were to try and encapsulate the first 300 years of copyright in the era of movable type intoa generalized concept, you might conclude that copyright wasn’t really about protecting intellectualproperty; it was overwhelmingly focused on protecting the power held by the industry of reproduction.

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Even though the first case of copyright infringement involved a seemingly unmechanized process (abishop hand copying a Psalter, then distributing it), hand copying was the industry standard at the time.At that point, the prevention of distribution from covert copies was not a matter of commerce, but of exerting power through the control of information; the copyright holder didn’t want the book copied atall. As soon as the printing press was invented, copyright as a commercial tool had real utility. Thosewho had access to the means of reproduction based their business on identifying and obtaining themost desirable things to reproduce, not unlike the modern commercial printing and software publishingindustry. The more copies sold, the greater the profit. If a text was particularly popular, multiple pressowners might want to print copies. Copyright of the content prevented rival press owners from honing inon each other’s action, and allowed authors to maintain oversight on content.It wasn’t until the formal concept of Public Domain was introduced that society returned to aview that information, or knowledge, was by its very nature, a product of society as a whole. While anauthor has the right to his ideas for a period, those ideas are built on the ideas of every thinker thatcame before them, and must be returned to the place they were taken from: the Public Domain.(Bollier, 2009;Engler, 2008 )For nearly 200 more years, common sense in copyright generally reigned. While an idea, asong or an image was current, about 14 years, or the span of a cultural generation, it was under thecontrol of the person who created it. After that time it was cast back into the mix, free to be used andreworked. Copyright revisions in the early 1900’s extended that term to 28 years with the option for thecreator to renew the copyright another 14 years. (Patterson, 1968)It may be hard to imagine now, but if this system of laws remained in place today, the entirecatalogue of the classic rock band Led Zeppelin would have been in the public domain onDecember31st, 1996. The first book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series,

The Philosopher’s Stone

,would be free to copy and tinker with by 2012.Modern copyright is largely the result of the republican political philosophies of writer Victor Hugo and a group of his French contemporaries. Hugo’s group, The

Association Littéraire et ArtistiqueInternationale

, desired to protect writers' and artists' rights. Their work, beginning at the association’sinception in 1878, resulted in the drafting of The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary andArtistic Works, an international agreement governing copyright, first accepted in 1886. (BerneConvention, 2009)The Berne Convention, on which international treatment of Canadian copyright law is based,states that once a work is fixed in a media, it is protected by copyright to the term prescribed by either the country of the creator, or the country it was first published in, whichever is longer. It also defines theparticular rights of the creator in respect to how the work can be duplicated, changed, or madeavailable. (International Bureau of WIPO, 1979)