Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

distributed to the public. This is especially mad given that the stated purpose of removing copyright protection from a work for which there is no demand will somehow be sufficient—by eliminating the author’s share and saving all of 7.5 percent or less on the list price—to resurrect it. That is, reducing the price of a $15.00 book to $13.88 will reverse its natural death. If more than one publisher issues it, a competition will arise that may reduce the price further. But this kind of competition already exists among bookstores, which are now the overlords of 50 to 80 percent of the list price. What would be left to the publishers in terms of price reduction will remain marginal because, in essence, it (the author’s 7.5 percent royalty on paperback editions) is marginal. And of all ways to lower the price of books, excluding only their authors or the authors’ heirs from any financial benefit is surely the least justifiable and the most depraved.

Almost unbelievably, a common misconception among the copyright abolitionists is that the value of a book or article is primarily physical. This view contradicts their stress on the (literally) insubstantial nature of a work—and thus, in their conception, the imperative of removing from it all forms of exclusive control—but, then, they often hold tenaciously to opposing positions. Accordingly, if one of their exemplars copies verbatim someone else’s book, buys the paper and the ink, prints and carts around the books, advertises them, he’s just as much entitled to the proceeds of, for example, Gravity’s Rainbow, as is Thomas Pynchon. As one of them puts it, in ignorance of grammar and the difference between handwriting and type, “I did all the work of typing in the manuscript just like he did.”41

Today, while driving into town to get a haircut at a barbershop where the calendar is open to January, 1952, I listened to Alfred Brendel playing Mozart cadenzas. I paid for the CD, as I would rather honor Alfred Brendel than steal from him. How often I have dreamt that I might play like that, and sadly reminded myself that, even if I had the pure musical talent, twelve hours of practice every day for the next twenty years would not do it. I have a wonderful piano, can play the first fifty-two bars of “Für Elise,” my rendition of which drives away rats and snakes. Given a few hundred years, I might eventually hit every note, in order, of a transcription of Brendel’s cadenzas. But everything else would be lacking, and where the value lies is precisely in everything else. Needless to say, the value added in a novel has little to do with the paper, ink, printing, binding, distribution, or sale of a book. These, as copyright opponents so often point out, are not even necessary conditions for the existence of a work, as anyone who has spent years writing a book is well aware. Depending upon numerous variables such as length, materials, print run, scheduling, and other parametric costs, a physical hardcover book is worth two or three 2008 dollars, more or less. Overhead, shipping, and selling add more. But the buyer judges the real value to be in the content, or he would buy books by the pound, blank books, or whatever book came blindly to hand.

Nor is the unique value in the plot, the themes, or the ideas, as these are, as copyright opponents also repeatedly point out, the common property of mankind and freely available from countless millions of sources. As much as Alfred Brendel cannot claim to own the individual sounds of the notes he plays, neither I nor anyone else can claim ownership of the words in books. What can be claimed, however, the value added, is their unique arrangement, skillful or otherwise. Perhaps there are people who do not have the ability to distinguish one work from another except in a programmatic comparison of plot, idea, or theme, and thus do not understand the essence of what they read. In regard to music, they would lack the ability to distinguish between Alfred Brendel and Vladimir Horowitz, or perhaps even between Alfred Brendel and me. Thus, not surprisingly, what explains the belief that typing a novel into a computer entitles the typist to many of the same privileges as its author, is nothing more notable than a coarse sensibility.

Closely related to the material fallacy is yet another misapprehension, advanced as a debunking of fallacy. Addressing the example of a house as a form of property that, unlike a copyrighted work, is protected indefinitely, a petitioner states, “The fallacy of this argument is that the building owner had to put money into the project before receiving any return.”42

So, there was no investment in, for example, the writing of Moby Dick, or of Appalachian Spring. Perhaps such a notion should not be surprising in light of the belief that pushing a button to download something confers rights equal to those of its author. But it is exemplary of something I myself have observed since childhood, for instance, in the philistine mistreatment of John Cheever.

People would demean him behind his back and to his face, often under the flimsy cover of a half joke, and their premise more often than not was that what he did was not real work. When he struggled they intimated that he deserved it, and when he triumphed they intimated that he did not. If the work of your life can be compassed on a foot or two of bookshelf, what can you have put in it, and are you not by definition one of a species of cunning sloth? In John Betjeman’s “Reproof Deserved, or, After the Lecture,” come the lines:

“Betjeman, I bet your racket brings you in a pretty packet

Raising the old lecture curtain, writing titbits here and there.

But, by Jove, your hair is thinner, since you came to us in Pinner,

And you’re fatter now, I’m certain. What you need is country air.”43

Where