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William Wordsworth's letter: "The Law of Copyright" (1838)

34 points by petethomas 1y ago

danielrri4o 1y ago
[dead]
saaaaaam 1y ago
What a letter. I found it helped to read it aloud to make proper sense of it.
ggrtraveller 1y ago
I’m grateful we have copyright laws, protecting the work of writers, musicians, and orher artists. But I’m equally grateful for the time limits and public domain laws. Would I even be aware of Wordsworth’s poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud” if it wasn’t so freely available?
sharkjacobs 1y ago
tl;dr: Wordsworth humbly urges lawmakers to pass a bill (extending duration of copyright to the greater of 42 years or authors lifetime plus 7 years). No argument or case for or against copyright is articulated
- reedf1 1y ago
  I think this is quite a naive reading of it - it is very very sharp criticism with several arguments made, written through a very polite veneer.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  > Wordsworth humbly urges lawmakers to pass a bill On the contrary, he declines to petition Parliament, saying in essence “I have to believe they’re not idiots enough to listen to that ridiculous printer and publisher lobbying”. He further adds this reason for not petitioning: that he holds it to be authors’ right, and equitable, that copyright be perpetual—this bill doesn’t go as far as he wants.
fedeb95 1y ago
Copyright restrictions of digital contents is a vestige of the past. Given today technologies, it is rather obsolete. For those thinking it goes against artists, keep in mind that a lot of art today is simply garbage made only for money. If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art. The digital world, making it extremely easy to access and copy human knowledge, is an achievement of the human mind. Patreons, or an art world evolving alongside society and other jobs, may be one of the possible natural adaptations to this human achievement. Otherwise we're making the same arguments as Luddites. For the unrestricted copyright inclined, there are ways to stay in legality, if such inclinations collide, and they are fruitful. You will find that consuming only public domain content will be a plus, not a privation.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- back2dafucha 1y ago
  The rights of ownership do not change because of technology. Technology as we are coming to understand it in its maturity (but immaturity of its practitioners) has come to serve largely only some veiled or unveiled form of thievery. Paper was just as easy to copy as an MP3. And material could be stolen through other means very easily. Wishing away intellectual property rights after you have stolen the entire Internet for profit, is simply your "get away car". Regardless of how this ends, the tech industry will be seen for what it is. A den of thieves and will never be forgiven. Smart people will stop using public repositories for source code. Open source will die. Programming languages will emerge that LLMs dont know anything about and work will continue in private. Bots will be banned. You cannot win this war.
  - 1gn15 1y ago
    On the contrary, it is people who attempt to restrict the flow of information who cannot win this war. You have to win every single time. The pirates will only have to win once, and information shall be free.
chrismorgan 1y ago
Here’s a paraphrase to diminish the abstruse verbiage of the era, so you can get wot he sed. —⁂— The printers and publishers have been lobbying to kill your Bill, so someone suggested I and another famous author show our support in a petition to Parliament to pass it, or at least one like it. I guess they asked me because I’m old [he was 68 at the time; he lived to 80], and so my relatives have a more obvious vested interest in extending copyright past my death. I don’t like to get involved in public affairs, and I like to think Parliament is wise enough to see why this Bill should obviously be passed, without us author having to point it out—the printers and publishers, having made their money and respectability from us, now want to squash us. I simply cannot believe that Parliament will be deceived by their very weak arguments. I also don’t want to petition Parliament about this as just one person, because it doesn’t go far enough: I hold that it is the right of all authors, that copyright should be forever. As you said in your speech, English common law used to work that way. So honestly, while they’re complaining about the idea of extending copyright, I want them to explain why we shouldn’t go back to how things were before we limited copyright! It’s obviously on them to show this, but they’re not even trying—they’ve framed the whole discussion relative to how things are now, which was a compromise between no copyright (in publishing something, you give it away completely) and perpetual copyright (inheritable and transferable). I get that literature isn’t quite the same as other kinds of property. Some people have said it should be treated the same as mechanical inventions and chemistry, but that’s obvious nonsense. I say rights of ownership are more fundamental in literature than other kinds of property. So: I’m not going to formally petition Parliament. (There were others that should have spoken up, but they haven’t.) I’ll content myself with writing this open letter so others can see what I believe, and understand that we’re with you, Serjeant Talfourd; thanks for helping us out, we do appreciate it. That’s all I wanted to say. I’ve got no arguments or facts to add, I, or my friends Coleridge, Scott, Southey, or others. I can’t say anything to convince people, if they weren’t already convinced by your excellent speech when you introduced the Bill, or which other writers have said in the public journals. I’m confident your Bill will pass. But even if these printers and publishers win for the moment, justice will win eventually. And in the mean time, all us authors thank you and your assistants for your efforts, for the rest of our lives.
- ozgrakkurt 1y ago
chrismorgan 1y ago
I’m not familiar enough with some of the background here. Per Wordsworth, Talfourd said (and Wordsworth agreed) that English common law had acknowledged perpetual heritable and transferable copyright. What period of history is that talking about? Before the Licensing of the Press Act 1662? Before the Statute of Anne (1710)? Before the Copyright Act 1814? And is it talking about the sort of thing now called moral rights, or authors’ rights? Because from what I’ve ever read, it didn’t sound like there was really anything in the way of copyright, no intellectual property law. If you had a manuscript, you could do what you wanted with it, including copying it. Of course, the printing press upset that balance, by making mass duplication practical, and so ultimately something had to be done. I’m sure there was more depth to the arguments than I can perceive now, but in desiring to go back to perpetual heritable and transferable copyright, it feels like Wordsworth was hankering for an era that was no longer realistic, due to technological development. We’ve seen a reflection of this issue in the last thirty years, as the cost of mass duplication of digital artefacts has again plummeted, this time to essentially nil. The genie is out of the bottle. I’d be curious to know how mainstream among authors Wordsworth’s feeling of perpetual heritable and transferable copyright being a right was. I wonder how he’d react if he saw what copyright has become. Maybe where it’s ended up isn’t quite what he had in mind. I don’t know. I know nothing of his character or nature. I do know that I would like the copyright system to be burned to the ground, and go back to something closer to the Statute of Anne. I like this scheme: ten years of free protection, then costing $10 × 1.5ⁿ⁻¹ for each subsequent year—$10, $15, $22.5… you ramp up to a million dollars per year by year 40, so that if it’s actually lucrative you can keep it a bit longer, but otherwise it lapses. Because in practice, copyright is the instrument helping very few people after even ten years.
- kemotep 1y ago
  The original copyright law of 1790 in the US was 14 years with option for another 14 year renewal, or a total of 28 years. A compromise between the Statute of Anne and something like original US Copyright would work pretty well.
- tempfile 1y ago
  > What period of history is that talking about? I also thought this was suspicious, and I believe now that it is just made up.
olddustytrail 1y ago
I wonder if Wordsworth would have been quite as keen on his works being treated as property if he'd known they would be owned by an American corporation by now and his own descendants would have to licence them for any use?
josh-sematic 1y ago
Somewhat ironic that we have the pleasure of reading Wordsworth’s thoughts for free thanks to the fact that Project Gutenberg is able to rely on the copyright being expired (given that Wordsworth argues copyright should last indefinitely).
- gxonatano 1y ago
  Even more ironic that the text of the Project Gutenberg license—for a public domain work!—is several times as long as Wordsworth's text.

34 points by petethomas 1y ago

danielrri4o 1y ago

[dead]

saaaaaam 1y ago

What a letter. I found it helped to read it aloud to make proper sense of it.

ggrtraveller 1y ago

I’m grateful we have copyright laws, protecting the work of writers, musicians, and orher artists. But I’m equally grateful for the time limits and public domain laws. Would I even be aware of Wordsworth’s poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud” if it wasn’t so freely available?

sharkjacobs 1y ago

tl;dr: Wordsworth humbly urges lawmakers to pass a bill (extending duration of copyright to the greater of 42 years or authors lifetime plus 7 years). No argument or case for or against copyright is articulated

reedf1 1y ago
I think this is quite a naive reading of it - it is very very sharp criticism with several arguments made, written through a very polite veneer.
chrismorgan 1y ago
> Wordsworth humbly urges lawmakers to pass a bill On the contrary, he declines to petition Parliament, saying in essence “I have to believe they’re not idiots enough to listen to that ridiculous printer and publisher lobbying”. He further adds this reason for not petitioning: that he holds it to be authors’ right, and equitable, that copyright be perpetual—this bill doesn’t go as far as he wants.

fedeb95 1y ago

Copyright restrictions of digital contents is a vestige of the past. Given today technologies, it is rather obsolete. For those thinking it goes against artists, keep in mind that a lot of art today is simply garbage made only for money. If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art. The digital world, making it extremely easy to access and copy human knowledge, is an achievement of the human mind. Patreons, or an art world evolving alongside society and other jobs, may be one of the possible natural adaptations to this human achievement. Otherwise we're making the same arguments as Luddites. For the unrestricted copyright inclined, there are ways to stay in legality, if such inclinations collide, and they are fruitful. You will find that consuming only public domain content will be a plus, not a privation.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
back2dafucha 1y ago
The rights of ownership do not change because of technology. Technology as we are coming to understand it in its maturity (but immaturity of its practitioners) has come to serve largely only some veiled or unveiled form of thievery. Paper was just as easy to copy as an MP3. And material could be stolen through other means very easily. Wishing away intellectual property rights after you have stolen the entire Internet for profit, is simply your "get away car". Regardless of how this ends, the tech industry will be seen for what it is. A den of thieves and will never be forgiven. Smart people will stop using public repositories for source code. Open source will die. Programming languages will emerge that LLMs dont know anything about and work will continue in private. Bots will be banned. You cannot win this war.
- 1gn15 1y ago
  On the contrary, it is people who attempt to restrict the flow of information who cannot win this war. You have to win every single time. The pirates will only have to win once, and information shall be free.

chrismorgan 1y ago

Here’s a paraphrase to diminish the abstruse verbiage of the era, so you can get wot he sed. —⁂— The printers and publishers have been lobbying to kill your Bill, so someone suggested I and another famous author show our support in a petition to Parliament to pass it, or at least one like it. I guess they asked me because I’m old [he was 68 at the time; he lived to 80], and so my relatives have a more obvious vested interest in extending copyright past my death. I don’t like to get involved in public affairs, and I like to think Parliament is wise enough to see why this Bill should obviously be passed, without us author having to point it out—the printers and publishers, having made their money and respectability from us, now want to squash us. I simply cannot believe that Parliament will be deceived by their very weak arguments. I also don’t want to petition Parliament about this as just one person, because it doesn’t go far enough: I hold that it is the right of all authors, that copyright should be forever. As you said in your speech, English common law used to work that way. So honestly, while they’re complaining about the idea of extending copyright, I want them to explain why we shouldn’t go back to how things were before we limited copyright! It’s obviously on them to show this, but they’re not even trying—they’ve framed the whole discussion relative to how things are now, which was a compromise between no copyright (in publishing something, you give it away completely) and perpetual copyright (inheritable and transferable). I get that literature isn’t quite the same as other kinds of property. Some people have said it should be treated the same as mechanical inventions and chemistry, but that’s obvious nonsense. I say rights of ownership are more fundamental in literature than other kinds of property. So: I’m not going to formally petition Parliament. (There were others that should have spoken up, but they haven’t.) I’ll content myself with writing this open letter so others can see what I believe, and understand that we’re with you, Serjeant Talfourd; thanks for helping us out, we do appreciate it. That’s all I wanted to say. I’ve got no arguments or facts to add, I, or my friends Coleridge, Scott, Southey, or others. I can’t say anything to convince people, if they weren’t already convinced by your excellent speech when you introduced the Bill, or which other writers have said in the public journals. I’m confident your Bill will pass. But even if these printers and publishers win for the moment, justice will win eventually. And in the mean time, all us authors thank you and your assistants for your efforts, for the rest of our lives.

ozgrakkurt 1y ago

chrismorgan 1y ago

I’m not familiar enough with some of the background here. Per Wordsworth, Talfourd said (and Wordsworth agreed) that English common law had acknowledged perpetual heritable and transferable copyright. What period of history is that talking about? Before the Licensing of the Press Act 1662? Before the Statute of Anne (1710)? Before the Copyright Act 1814? And is it talking about the sort of thing now called moral rights, or authors’ rights? Because from what I’ve ever read, it didn’t sound like there was really anything in the way of copyright, no intellectual property law. If you had a manuscript, you could do what you wanted with it, including copying it. Of course, the printing press upset that balance, by making mass duplication practical, and so ultimately something had to be done. I’m sure there was more depth to the arguments than I can perceive now, but in desiring to go back to perpetual heritable and transferable copyright, it feels like Wordsworth was hankering for an era that was no longer realistic, due to technological development. We’ve seen a reflection of this issue in the last thirty years, as the cost of mass duplication of digital artefacts has again plummeted, this time to essentially nil. The genie is out of the bottle. I’d be curious to know how mainstream among authors Wordsworth’s feeling of perpetual heritable and transferable copyright being a right was. I wonder how he’d react if he saw what copyright has become. Maybe where it’s ended up isn’t quite what he had in mind. I don’t know. I know nothing of his character or nature. I do know that I would like the copyright system to be burned to the ground, and go back to something closer to the Statute of Anne. I like this scheme: ten years of free protection, then costing $10 × 1.5ⁿ⁻¹ for each subsequent year—$10, $15, $22.5… you ramp up to a million dollars per year by year 40, so that if it’s actually lucrative you can keep it a bit longer, but otherwise it lapses. Because in practice, copyright is the instrument helping very few people after even ten years.

kemotep 1y ago
The original copyright law of 1790 in the US was 14 years with option for another 14 year renewal, or a total of 28 years. A compromise between the Statute of Anne and something like original US Copyright would work pretty well.
tempfile 1y ago
> What period of history is that talking about? I also thought this was suspicious, and I believe now that it is just made up.

olddustytrail 1y ago

I wonder if Wordsworth would have been quite as keen on his works being treated as property if he'd known they would be owned by an American corporation by now and his own descendants would have to licence them for any use?

josh-sematic 1y ago

Somewhat ironic that we have the pleasure of reading Wordsworth’s thoughts for free thanks to the fact that Project Gutenberg is able to rely on the copyright being expired (given that Wordsworth argues copyright should last indefinitely).

gxonatano 1y ago
Even more ironic that the text of the Project Gutenberg license—for a public domain work!—is several times as long as Wordsworth's text.