By Tony Woodlief in The Wall Street Journal
'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal," wrote T.S. Eliot. I am neither poet nor thief, so when I wanted poems at the start of each chapter in my recently published memoir, I sought permission. The poem that best describes my experience is "The Odyssey," navigating as I did between the Scylla of non-responsive copyright holders and the Charybdis of fee-seeking attorneys.
Modern copyright practices spur artists to unmoor our work from what has inspired us. Art—along with many artists supposedly protected by these laws—is arguably poorer for it.
The modern copyright battle is more interesting than its associated legalities. Advocates of copyright restrictions found a bête noire in curmudgeonly novelist Mark Helprin, who argued that Congress should extend "the term of copyright . . . as far as it can throw."
Opponents took this to mean perpetual copyright, which Mr. Helprin denies. In turn he accuses his vocal critic Lawrence Lessig, co-founder of Creative Commons—a nonprofit that encourages art sharing consistent with copyrights—of leading a movement to ravage Western civilization.
In reality, both sides agree with the premise embedded in the Constitution, which is that people ought not enjoy art without compensating the artist, any more than one can dine without paying the chef. They also recognize that while we want to give artists incentives, we don't want the costs to be so high that art appreciation—a difficult cultural attribute to re-establish once it is lost —declines.
Mr. Lessig appears to win on the economics. Mr. Helprin claims injustice in the fact that the family of a factory owner can inherit his property through generations, while the family of a writer loses rights to his creations in a relatively short time. Mr. Lessig observes, however, that copyright holders don't pay property taxes, which evens out financial returns over the course of a 95-year copyright.
Full story at WSJ.
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