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Spider Robinson betrays intellectual freedom ?
An article by Spider Robinson in the Globe and Mail discusses the Eldred v. Ashcroft case. Robinson writes humorously, so it's hard to be sure whether he seriously means anything in the article. But I'll address some of the points he appears to try to make by acting as if he means them seriously. Robinson writes:"I've written 32 books so far....So when I do snuff it, I'd like to leave them, and any money they may fetch (the wee percentage the publishers, producers and taxmen won't keep) to my daughter Terri -- just like any other craftsman would." This is full of mistakes. Robinson cannot "leave" his books to Terri or to anyone else. He doesn't own his books. If he owns the copyrights in his books he can, if the law permits, leave them to others. But the books themselves belong to all mankind. (Here I must stop the mouths of the inevitable fools by repeating that "the books" here referred to are intangible things, and that my statement that they are public goods has no bearing on anyone's right, or lack of one, to anything made of matter.) "Any other craftsman" would have to choose between selling his creation on the one hand, and keeping it to leave to his heirs on the other. Robinson seems to think (again, assuming he's writing seriously) that he can have it both ways, unlike any other craftsman. One stated purpose of the 1976 and 1998 extensions was to allow authors to provide for "their dependents". Doing this by creating a copyright that is calculated to outlive the author by more than a generation is already a stretch of the Constitution's wording, which only permits Congress to grant copyrights to "authors". But apart from this, by Robinson's own admission Terri is 28, and therefore (unless more appears) no longer a "dependent". The existing term of copyright has lasted until Terri's minority ended, and the period post mortem auctoris hasn't even needed to be invoked yet. Robinson writes: "'Melancholy Elephants' was originally dedicated to the remarkable Virginia Heinlein, Robert Heinlein's widow. On Jan. 18, Ginny passed away in her sleep in Florida, surrounded by family and friends. She leaves several descendants -- one 3 years old -- and I don't see why they should get ripped off because 'information wants to be free.' Many reasonably fertile people will have young descendents at one time or another for many generations. But since, as professor William Patry has noted, "the parade has to end some time", and since the U.S. law prior to the CTEA already provided for 50 years post mortem auctoris, this is irrelevant to the question of whether the 20 year extension will "promote progress" enough to be worth the extra burden to the public. Robinson doesn't say whether the 3-year-old was Robert Heinlein's dependent. But even if so, the shorter life+50 term would have lasted 50 years from Robert Heinlein's death in 1988--well beyond the 3-year-old's minority. Are Ginny's parents so improvident that they can only provide for her future by imposing monopoly costs on the rest of us an additional 20 years beyond what the law already gave ? More to the point, this paragraph assumes that the expiration of the copyright by operation of the law "rips" the rightsholders "off". This is backward. When the public, through the law, granted the copyright, it agreed to rip itself off in a way. It agreed to refrain for a time from exercising rights that it would otherwise have in order to encourage the authors to write and publish their works. The idea is that in the end the public's short-term sacrifice will result in a larger public domain in letters than otherwise. For the public to insist that the bargain be kept, and that it resume its full rights at the previously agreed time, doesn't "rip" anyone "off". It is more of a ripoff for the term to be extended; it is as if the public had almost paid off the mortgage on a house, only to have the bank demand 20 more years of payments.
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