Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

and make use of the proceeds—perhaps today his descendants would own hotels in the Bahamas—or keep it, which probably would have been the better bet. It is highly illogical, however, to try to prove that copyright extension is unjust because in general the performance of assets is not guaranteed.

In a misfortune that has spread to the contemporary anti-copyright enthusiasts, Macaulay, who cared little for art and was deaf to music, was also blind to economics. In what he terms “a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright,” he states that “Milton’s works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody who wants them must buy them at Tonson’s shop, and at Tonson’s price…. Thousands who would gladly possess a copy of Paradise Lost, must forego that great enjoyment.”64

Assuming that Tonson’s price is “unreasonably” high, and Macaulay curiously does not state this, were it lower there still would be thousands who would not pay it. With exceptions that are most probably anomalous, the price would be set according to the demand, just as it would be during the author’s life. If the bookseller/publisher elevates it disproportionately, no one will buy. Thus he will not elevate it. It will be to his advantage to set a price on the vector between, on the one hand, the highest he can charge, and, on the other, the highest volume of sales he can achieve. This is how the market works—not by design or decree, not because someone has decided that it would be best that way, but because of the nature of things. If you doubt it, visit a bookstore.

Apparently, Macaulay did: “I can buy Rasselas for sixpence; I might have had to give five shillings for it. I can buy the Dictionary, the entire genuine Dictionary, for two guineas, perhaps for less; I might have had to give five or six guineas for it.”65 He has simply made up higher prices (“I might have had to give…I might have had to give.”) and perhaps even the second lower price (“For two guineas, perhaps for less”). These are not facts he cites but fanciful or unrepresentative illustrations leaping conveniently from his imagination to the defense of his argument. And yet, this argument, specious in 1841, has descended to his hapless present-day admirers, who make similar claims as a matter of course, such as that were Mark Twain’s works still protected, schoolchildren would not be able to read them due to the prohibitive pricing. The facts are different.

For example, readily at hand on the bookshelf next to me as I write is Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, copyrighted of course, in paper, published in 1994, at 911 pages, two pounds eight ounces, and with photographs, priced at $22. The Adams-Jefferson Letters (the editing under copyright but the contents in the public domain) published seven years earlier, 638 pages, at two pounds three ounces, with no pictures, and assisted by a grant from the Lilly Foundation, is also available. Despite its earlier publication date and that it is only two-thirds the size of the Kissinger (anything would be), and was subsidized, it costs not 1,000 percent less (as Macaulay would have it) but the same $22.

In fiction, you can buy Les Misérables, plucked from the public domain, in a Modern Library binding, at 1,260 pages and two pounds nine ounces for $25.95. And you can buy (and I wish you would) my A Soldier of the Great War, copyrighted thank God, in trade paper with a beautiful Bellini on the cover, at 860 pages and two pounds, for $16. The Hugo is 47 percent larger and 28 percent heavier, but it is also 62 percent more expensive, not 1,000 percent less expensive. True, you can get an economy edition of Les Misérables for $7, but you can also get the mass market edition of A Soldier of the Great War for $6.

Beyond the 15 percent author’s royalty on hardcover and 7.5 percent on paperbacks, copyright has little effect on book pricing. Publishers and booksellers know that other than the few people who for some reason must have a particular book, their customers have a wide choice, and will be put off by price. If only a few books were available, it might be different, but there are at any time hundreds of thousands, even millions—a choice that allows very few publishers to be either grasping or coy with the public: these impulses they save for dealings with their writers.

Neither Macaulay nor his disciples of the present confine their imprecision to such practical examples, but expand it to embrace higher things as well. Macaulay writes, and his followers frequently and thoughtlessly repeat that, “The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers.”66

Words have meaning, and it is not good to be careless with them, like the official who said that a border shouldn’t be a line between nations. When I was young I spent some time reading the dictionary. In so doing, I happened upon a definition of masturbation as “self-abuse.” (As to the accuracy of this, ask Philip Roth.) It slept in my mind like a locust, until it emerged when my ninth-grade history class was asked to describe how the monks lived during the Middle Ages, and without the least bit of self-consciousness or embarrassment I volunteered that they were known for their incessant masturbation.

In Eldred v. Ashcroft, the banner case of the anti-copyright movement, and deservedly so, in that they lost, Mr. Justice Breyer (or a young insufficiently critical clerk mentally vacuuming from the petitioner’s brief) conflates in his dissent the Constitution’s copyright clause with Macaulay’s description: “The clause authorizes a ‘tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers.’”67 It does no such thing, and copyright is not a tax.

It is not a tax any more than a workman’s wage or the price a merchant receives for a sale, or a fisherman for his fish, is a tax. One