Copyright Critics Rationalize Theft...Writers, composers & designers need to fight back! BE A HERO & DON'T STEAL or DOWNLOAD.ILLEGAL MP3S.

FREE GUITAR CONTEST!

TOUCHTUNES' Custom Paul Reed Smith GIVEAWAY for SAVING ABEL FANS!

http://www.touchtunes.com/saving-abel-sweepstakes-landing-page.html

###

Copyright Critics Rationalize Theft

Writers, composers, designers and other content creators need to fight back.

By MARK HELPRIN

Imagine a city of many millions of people who support themselves and their families solely by arranging words, images and sounds, or in the industries that make this work available to others. They neither farm, fish, mine, manufacture, manage, heal, teach, build nor defend. But what they do influences most everything, shapes politics and governance, provides a conception of our time, forges the culture such as it is, and stamps the imprint of the present for history to judge. Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down.

Dispersed throughout the United States, the millions of this hypothetical city do exist, in professions dependent upon the copyright protection of intellectual property. More than anywhere else, they are concentrated in New York, where you see them walking at 60 miles per hour, fully absorbed in their novels, plans, melodies, compositions, essays or designs.

Their work is peculiarly vulnerable in that it is easy to appropriate. If they were farmers, industrialists or surgeons, their problems would be different. It is not possible to copy instantaneously and in virtually unlimited quantities either potatoes, aluminum or gall bladder surgeries, as one might a song or a scanned book.  

Were this vulnerability unaddressed, the producers of intellectual property would be put out of business unless they were independently wealthy or worked either as amateurs or drew salaries at the pleasure of, and beholden to, boards, committees and overseers of every type. Always at risk, the independent voice, the guarantor of political freedom and personal dignity, would be dangerously depressed along with the arts that sustain civilization. Amateurs alone are insufficient -- unless one believes that the work of Herman Melville, Thomas Eakins and Aaron Copeland does not merit full-time employment.

The vulnerability, however, has been addressed, by copyright systems evolving in tandem with the ever-increasing volume of works they protect. This has proceeded over centuries, as copyright adjusts to new means of replication while sheltering the works without which the new technologies would be meaningless.  

But copyright, the rampart of the mythical city, is besieged by a widespread movement antagonistic to authorial right and the legitimacy of intellectual property. So-called public interest groups serve the new information super powers, the Standard Oils of our age, whose interests would be advanced if they did not have to bother with permissions and payments for what they call "content." The Creative Commons organization, for example, is richly financed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Mozilla, Sun, the Hewlett Foundation, and others of type.  

The opponents of copyright are no more disinterested than its defenders, although they do a good job of pretending, and their theories have become the window dressing for the piracy of software, music, movies -- and soon the written word. They may claim that they are not against copyright per se. But if, as they repeatedly assert, copyright is an unjustifiable tax, a monopoly, and a bar to creativity, why wouldn't they or anyone else be against it, as in fact they are?  

Copyright is no more a tax than the price a merchant charges for an item in his shop or what a laborer receives for his labor. Nor is it a monopoly any more than you have a monopoly on the sale of a watermelon you might grow in your garden, or the monopoly a seamstress exercises over her work. The opponents of copyright disingenuously maintain that it locks up ideas, comment and debate. Title 17 of the United States Code resoundingly says otherwise, that "in no case does copyright protection . . . extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described." And as for debate, have you noticed a lack of it?  

In previous eras, advances in the ease of replication were met by the consistent strengthening of copyright -- in lengthening the term, international standardization, increased enforcement. This did not discourage the production of works, which advanced by orders of magnitude. In Thomas Macaulay's England of 1825, 600 books were published. Economic growth, universal education, more efficient printing, and a strong system of copyright together saw 206,000 books published in England in 2005. One might attempt to argue the counterfactual, that even more books would have been published without copyright, but one would first have to establish that the incentive of being paid for one's work is a disincentive to producing it.  

With the swelling powers of digitization come the antagonists of intellectual property, who address the issue without popular opposition. Corporations with intellectual-property interests now field lawyers and lobbyists, as do their adversaries. This will eventually result in a tie, which will be broken only by the public opinion that corporate moguls and magnates (often accused of dominating public opinion) have in this regard totally ignored.  

So here we have a city -- the hypothetical city and New York itself -- deeply dependent upon what copyright protects but unaware of the threat it faces, even as, sector by sector, it begins to fall. Are you -- were you -- in publishing? Are you, or were you, a journalist? A screenwriter, composer, architect, designer, photographer, writer, or in a business that brings the work of these people to the public? What have you done to protect your life's blood and to guarantee the continued independence of your voice? As distressed as you may be now or not long from now, should copyright go the way of all flesh, some of you may soon be unable even to recognize your own profession, if indeed it continues to exist.  

New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren't. Fight back.  

Mr. Helprin is the author, most recently, of "Digital Barbarism," just published by HarperCollins.