New article on copyright and literary production in the Romantic period

William Hazlitt (1778-1830), prose centonist

My article in the new issue of English Studies in Canada brings some historical perspective to the copyfight, and suggests some precedents for fair dealing in the work of Romantic writers usually identified as exemplars of originality: William Hazlitt and William Wordsworth. The article focuses on the curious case of the cento – a genre of poetry made from quoted lines of other poems – and its various uses in literary production during the Romantic period. This was a very interesting period for copyright: neither before nor since has the term of copyright protection been as brief, and arguably as accommodating (to users and writers), as it was from 1774 to 1842. The article belongs to a special section in this issue of ESC on Romantic and Regency authorship, featuring some exciting new work on the period’s print culture – and its implications for cultural production and copyright today.

“The Cento, Romanticism, and Copyright.” English Studies in Canada 38.2 (2012): 71-101. [Published June 2013]
Published journal version (for readers with university library access)
Open Access version (for readers without university library access)

Abstract: This article excavates the obscure literary genre of the cento – a genre of poetry defined by its wholly derivative composition from quotations of other works – and its supplementary relation to Romantic literature and the period’s transformations of copyright regulation. The cento’s Romantic reworkings position this genre as a precedent for later appropriation art, especially digital culture’s sampling and remix practices. Specific uses of the cento form by the essayist William Hazlitt and the poet William Wordsworth suggest precedents in the period’s culture of literary production for fair dealing, the “user’s right” to the limited appropriation of copyrighted works that has more recently become ensconced in copyright law. By investigating the place of the cento in Romantic literary production, this study argues for the importance of fair dealing to both creative and critical forms of writing, and contributes historical context to the present-day “copyfight.”

The Open Access version of “The Cento, Romanticism, and Copyright” is made available with the author’s grateful acknowledgement of English Studies in Canada for the original publication of the article.

Access Copyright sues York U over fair dealing policy

Access Copyright – the photocopy royalty-collecting society that has gradually morphed into a lobbying-and-lawsuit engine – continues its misadventures in litigation this week with  a lawsuit against York University over the institution’s fair dealing policy.

For preliminary expert analysis on the developing situation, see Howard Knopf’s blog post, and Michael Geist’s post on the legal action:

Access Copyright has decided to fight the law – along with governments, educational institutions, teachers, librarians, and taxpayers … it has filed a lawsuit against York University over its fair dealing guidelines, which are similar to those adopted by educational institutions across the country. While the lawsuit has yet to be posted online, the Access Copyright release suggests that the suit is not alleging specific instances of infringement, but rather takes issue with guidelines it says are “arbitrary and unsupported” and that “authorize and encourage copying that is not supported by the law.”

Read Access Copyright’s Statement of Claim against York University here.

Stakeholders in copyright and Canadian education are questioning the timing of the action, and the targeting of York, seeing the action as – variously – a test, as a fishing expedition, and/or as an intimidation tactic to chill the more robust and eminently lawful approach to fair dealing that is taking hold across Canadian schools and campuses. It may be too soon to forecast a decision, but the recent case law history and the now-amended copyright legislation (which explicitly provides for educational fair dealing) are both decidedly in York’s favour. The “quintet” of Supreme Court copyright cases that were decided last summer – cases that included Alberta (Education) v. Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright) - have helped to restore some balance to Canadian copyright law in favour of users (for a welcome change), and, in the process, have made the legal climate very inhospitable to actions like the one Access Copyright is now pursuing.

One has to wonder whether all the money Access Copyright spends on legal expenses wouldn’t be better reallocated to its core business: remunerating writers.

Open letter to Bill C-11 committee

To: Dean Del Mastro, Christian Paradis, James Moore, Phil McColeman, Peter Braid, Rob Moore, Paul Calandra, Scott Armstrong, Glenn Thibeault, Charlie Angus, Tyrone Benskin, Pierre Nantel, Pierre DionneLabelle, Andrew Cash, Geoff Regan
CC: my MP

Dear Bill C11 committee members,

I am writing to ask you please to maintain a balanced approach in finalizing and passing Bill C11.
The bill must not allow SOPA-style amendments (e.g. enabler provisions, site blocking, content takedowns), and it must maintain – not diminish – its already substantial fair dealing provisions.
I have previously expressed to you my concerns about C11′s digital lock provisions, and was made to understand that you are committed to passing Bill C11 without changes. If you are now considering changes, they must, if anything, be changes that better serve public not private interest. The demands now being made of C11 by music, software, and other entertainment lobbies must be refused, or else you risk doing grievous harm with this legislation to Canadian innovation, opportunity, and heritage.

Thank you for fielding these concerns.

Have you written to your MP and the Bill C11 committee yet? See Geist’s link below for ideas.

For more information about Bill C-11 and possible amendments, see:
Geist, Michael. “Closing time on C-11.” MichaelGeist.ca 8 Mar. 2012.
Knopf, Howard. “#C11 & Just Say No to Policy Bullying and the Imposition of Laws based on Policy-based Evidence Making.” Excess Copyright 9 Mar. 2012.
Winseck, Dwayne. “Wealth destroyers and end game for the copyright modernization act.” Mediamorphis 8 Mar. 2012.

How to use Access Copyright’s look-up tool: DON’T.

As copyright lawyer Howard Knopf blogged earlier this week, the collecting agency Access Copyright has released a “repertoire look-up tool” that, according to the Access Copyright website, is designed to “help” Canadian educators “determine whether you can make a copy from a book, journal, magazine, newspaper or similar publication.”

The AC website specifies that that the tool is for educators at institutions subject to AC licenses (like the “bone-stupid” deals U of T and Western signed) or tariffs (two of which, as Knopf points out, don’t exist). However, the tool is presented in a way that makes it seem like an educator’s first, natural stop for checking whether a given publication can be copied.

It isn’t, of course. As Knopf also points out, your first stop is not Access Copyright but Canadian law, specifically the fair dealing provisions of the copyright act.

What AC is not telling you is that anyone can copy anything protected by copyright as long as the copying does not constitute a “substantial part” of the work, or if it does, the copying falls within the users’ rights of “fair dealing” or, if necessary, the other exceptions found in ss. 29.3 ff. of the Copyright Act.

So the Access Copyright “look-up tool” is, partly, an exercise in perception management, making the agency seem more valuable than it is to educators. (I wonder how much the tool cost them to develop?)

There is also the distinct possibility the tool is of use mainly to Access Copyright itself, despite purporting to be a service for AC’s clients. This is pure speculation, but it is entirely possible that AC has launched this tool as an instrument for mining user data. The tool asks for minimal data to search, but the tool could be recording and interpreting the user-generated inputs for ISBNs, and for digital or print preferences, as a means to gauge user copying practices. The user-provided data could then be interpreted towards justifying Access Copyright’s consistently ludicrous tariff proposals.

In short, this might be yet another way for AC to try to get its clients to do free work for it. In the words of what’s now an Internet mantra, “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

I’m not saying AC is doing this; I’m just saying it’s technically possible. However, if Access Copyright were mining data provided by users of the look-up tool, then – as was suggested on the listserv where I suggested this possibility – they might be in violation of PIPEDA (Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act).

In any case, I think the potential for data mining here is a plausible enough reason to simply ignore the look-up tool entirely. In case Canada’s robust fair dealing protection wasn’t enough reason already to ignore Access Copyright entirely.

Works Cited

“Access Copyright Repertoire Look Up Tool.” Access Copyright, n.d.

Doctorow, Cory. “Canadian universities sign bone-stupid copyright deal with collecting society: emailing a link is the same as making a photocopy, faculty email to be surveilled.” BoingBoing 20 Feb. 2012.

Fitzpatrick, Jason. “If you’re not paying for it; you’re the product” [sic]. Lifehacker 23 Nov. 2010.

Government of Canada. Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, 2000.

Knopf, Howard. “Access Copyright Repertoire Look Up Tool – Beta Version – Not Yet Ready for Prime Time.” Excess Copyright 5 Mar. 2012.

What’s Battlestar Galactica got to do with the copyfight?

My article on Battlestar Galactica and Canada-USA tensions over copyright is now available in open access full text at AU’s repository (courtesy of Liverpool UP). At the link you can read the abstract and download the PDF.

McCutcheon, Mark A. “Downloading Doppelgängers: New Media Anxieties and Transnational Ironies in Battlestar Galactica.” Science Fiction Film and Television 2.1 (2009): 1-24.

So what’s Battlestar got to do with copyright? Briefly, the show was produced in the USA, but it was shot in Canada, and it cast Canadian actors as the lead bad guys, who “download” a lot. At press time, Bill C-61 was on the table, but the argument remains relevant to C-32′s expected successor. The recently leaked cables showing the “U.S. swayed Canada on copyright bill” (Geist) add fresh evidence to my claims.

The OA version has neither the layout nor the frame-grab still shots from Battlestar that grace the publisher’s version. There’s an ironic copyright backstory story here. I got the proofs of my article laid out with lots of these still frames — none of which I’d chosen, let alone cleared. I told the editor the images added great illustrative value, but I was concerned about their copyright status — wouldn’t their uncleared use lead to litigation? The editor replied to say that, although “the copyright law around frame-grabbed images” had not yet been tested,

it is the case in the UK that they can be used without obtaining permission (and in the US and Canada, they are covered by fair-use clauses – at least until they too are tested in court). Publishers like [***] Press regularly use images without obtaining permission. We discussed this issue with Liverpool UP before launching the journal and they are prepared to go along with our understanding of the situation; and we do always credit the source of images, even though this is not strictly necessary.

Imagine my delight, then, that this essay on copyright got to appear in print accompanied by illustrative images used legally but without the Hollywood producers’ permission.

It’s only fair that research on copyright law should be openly accessible. It’s a bonus that fair dealing became a principle of this work’s form.

Work Cited

Geist, Michael. “Leaks show U.S. swayed Canada on copyright bill.” Toronto Star 3 Sept. 2011.

Call for papers on Literature & the Copyfight, for Congress 2012

Call for papers: Literature & the Copyfight, Congress 2012.

Critical scholarship is urgently needed to intervene on the question of copyright: once a staple stimulus for literary and cultural production that now tends more to stifle it. … This session invites papers on the relationship between literature, copyright, and the copyfight.

The deadline for submissions is 15 Nov. 2011 (see link for contact info). Thanks to ACCUTE and SDH for joint hosting.

[Instead of posting the complete call for papers here, I'm practicing not duplicating content.]

Uploading to Youtube: “derivative work” or “public display”?

Browsing the OER Commons for course content, I found some introductory videos, in Quicktime format, about the Harlem Renaissance, licensable for educational use.

Experimentally, I uploaded one to the Landing (AU’s social network), to see if it would play in that network’s default media player (Flowplayer). It wouldn’t. A subsequent Landing discussion about the tech trouble has led me to consider Youtube as a technical workaround: if the Quicktime video won’t play in the Landing, a Youtube version of it will.

But anything involving Youtube and third-party content involves legal as well as technical questions. The question here is whether uploading to Youtube a video used under Creative Commons-type  licensing (specifically, a Teachersdomain.org “Download and Share” license) is okay or not.

The license wording seems ambiguous on the question of Youtube uploading, and in need of interpretation. On one hand, the license expressly forbids “derivative works”: you may not make “a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.” Uploading this video to Youtube means transforming – or, arguably, translating – the work from Quicktime format to flash-video format. However, the vocabulary and context of the license language here seems to suggest not technical but creative transformation.

So on the other hand, provided the use is for educational purposes only, the license does allow you to “distribute, publicly display, publicly perform (digitally or otherwise) the Work (as long as it is properly acknowledged and attributed).” This language seems less ambiguous: it does permit public, digital display. That seems to speak to what Youtube is about.

I’m not a legal expert, so I’m inclined to err on the side of caution here. But given how new Creative Commons-type licensing is, and how clear and robust fair use is (the content is USA-made), I find it an interesting case to consider on the matter of educational-use repurposing.

Cross-blogged from the AU Landing

Teachers, it’s time to flex fair dealing.

Yesterday, a happy coincidence: first, a highschool friend, now an educator, asked me out-of-the-blue on Facebook (it’s the kind of thing I love about FB) a question about copyright infringement cases involving educators; second, I received CAUT‘s new Guidelines for the Use of Copyrighted Material, a must-read primer on fair dealing for educators. I’ve reproduced my friend’s question and my response, extending the latter with more about fair dealing and CAUT’s guide — because more educators need to know how liberally we can and should be exercising our robust fair dealing rights.

Q: I need an example of a Canadian Copyright Infringement Case related to academics or education and am having trouble finding anything interesting on the net…. I thought you may have a ready example given your recent involvement on the subject. Any thoughts or suggestions on where I can find what I’m looking for?

A: Probably the most important case for copyright and education in Canada was Law Society of Upper Canada v. CCH Canadian in 2004. Michael Geist outlines and links to it in a recent blog post about fair dealing.

Canada’s Heritage ministry has some analysis of it (but keep in mind that this is one of the ministries responsible for tabling Bill C-32). The ministry analysis considers the opportunities and implications of the CCH decision, one important result of which is simply its formal recognition in law that “fair dealing, as construed by the court, now allows for a more flexible framework.” And while the ministry’s analysis suggests problems raised by the decision, it doesn’t suggest they’d be solved by the “digital locks” provision that made C-32 so hotly contested. Citing scholars’ and students’ dissatisfaction with licensing, the analysis attributes some of this to a failure of CanCopy (now Access Copyright) to recompense authors: “CanCopy ‘had more than $18 million in undistributed royalties, and no apparently systematic way of determining to whom this money belongs’.”)

Howard Knopf (whose blog, like Geist’s, is also very good on copyright) also summarizes the importance of CCH v. LSUC in this recent post:

…the CCH decision in the Supreme Court of Canada made it very clear that:
• “User rights are not just loopholes. Both owner rights and user rights should therefore be given the fair and balanced reading that befits remedial legislation.” and.
• “ The fair dealing exception under s. 29 is open to those who can show that their dealings with a copyrighted work were for the purpose of research or private study. ‘Research’ must be given a large and liberal interpretation in order to ensure that users’ rights are not unduly constrained.”

There are also some relevant fair dealing cases and appeals underway right now:

Province of Alberta v. Access Copyright. Knopf is blogging about it, as in this post from early May; according to Knopf, the case “involves the very important issue of whether material prescribed by a teacher or provided in multiple copies can be fair dealing.”

This blog post by Knopf makes reference to the SOCAN v. Bell case, which investigated “whether providing previews consisting of excerpts of works is fair dealing for the purpose of research that does not infringe copyright.” In May 2010, the Federal Court of Appeals decided that that the free 30-second previews provided by music download vendors like iTunes are to be treated as fair dealing for consumer research purposes. Geist is reporting new appeals to and interventions in that decision.

Notably, of these cases, only Alberta v. Access Copyright directly involves educational institutions. But all three cases have significant bearing on the educational exercise of fair dealing. Enter the CAUT Guidelines, and the following. As stated in the message to which CAUT attached its Guidelines:

There has been a good deal of controversy and conflicting advice regarding when copyrighted material may be copied without permission or payment to the copyright owner. CAUT is concerned that both users and owners of copyrighted material are treated fairly. To that end, CAUT has prepared the attached document [which] explains the legal foundation of copying rights and provides direction on its lawful exercise.

The “controversy and conflict” to which CAUT alludes has resulted from debates about Bill C-32 and about ACTA and CETA, from Access Copyright’s “astroturfing” against fair dealing in C-32, and also maybe from increasing actions over mere linking. Now dead but expected back from the grave soon, Bill C-32 promised good, clear fair dealing provisions for educators, albeit provisions trumped by protections for “digital locks” like DRM. Often compared to the USA’s DMCA, Bill C-32′s fair dealing for educators actually fell short of the flexible and generous provisions given US educators. Check out this syllabus for Martha Woodmansee’s course on copyright — look at all the freely available course readings. (If that’s what US fair use now affords, then Canadian fair dealing should, too.)

Access Copyright (AC) lobbied hard against C-32′s educational fair dealing provisions, all the while while negotiating a massively inflated licensing tariff for educators. The royalty-collecting society’s campaign, in effect, pitted the creators of published works against the educators who use them, caused much confusion over the perceived pros and cons of new copyright legislation, and also provoked lots of institutions to decline to renew their licensing agreements with AC. AC is vigorously opposing the fair dealing provisions in any new Canadian copyright legislation — after all, revised and expanded fair dealing provisions could well put a collecting agency like AC out of business.

Meanwhile, the mere act of hyperlinking is increasingly subject to regulation. In Crookes v. Newton (2009), the BC Court of Appeal ruled that a website owner is not liable for linking to defamatory sites, that decision is now being appealed. In March of this year, the US Dept of Homeland Security arrested an Internet user for linking. And AC’s proposed new tariffs for PSE call for the documentation of and collection of fees for any and all Internet linking done by teachers (this proposal has not been approved and could be debates for months if not years).

Taken together, all these different developments, together with privately imposed teaching policies and publishing guidelines (e.g. a limit of 150 words on quoted excerpts in refereed articles, which I’ve heard of anecdotally but can’t find documented), are chilling the climate for fair dealing, and enclosing that much more of the already shrinking commons of public knowledge. Which is to say, they’re chilling the climate for teaching. As Michael Geist told delegates at last year’s ABC Copyright Conference, fair dealing is a “use it or lose it provision”: if Canadian educators don’t start exercising our fair dealing rights more extensively and aggressively, we stand to lose them altogether under the pressure of Big Media’s hugely influential lobbying efforts.

Fortunately, court decisions like LSUC v. CCH can and should embolden us to flex our fair dealing rights, rather than shrink from doing so under threat of litigation. The legal precedents currently support a “large and liberal” interpretation of fair dealing, and, as public educators, we have, I think, an ethical responsibility — not to mention a huge convenience — to act on that interpretation, towards principled and productive pedagogy. Against the creeping chill over academic freedom and effective teaching, give CAUT’s Guidelines a read — take ten minutes to learn the basics of educational fair dealing — and start staking your claim to a patch of the knowledge commons. A modest and reasonable patch, tended properly and shared appropriately, can yield large and liberal teaching outcomes.

Works Consulted

CAUT. Guidelines for the Use of Copyrighted Material. Ottawa: CAUT/ACPPU, May 2011
http://www.caut.ca/uploads/Copyright_guidelines.pdf

Edmonds, Kelly. “Off with their heads! Copyright infringement in the Canadian online higher educational environment.” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology 32.2 (2006)
http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/52/49

Dhawan, Sona. “Potential Liability for Hyperlinking: Crookes v. Newton.” The Court [blog] 31 Mar. 2010
http://www.thecourt.ca/2010/03/31/potential-liability-for-hyperlinking-crookes-v-newton/

Federal Court of Appeal. Decisions of the Federal Court of Appeal [database].
http://decisions.fca-caf.gc.ca/en/index.html

Geist, Michael. “The Canadian Copyfight Story: The Next Chapter.” ABC Copyright Conference. Athabasca U, 21 June 2010.

—. Michael Geist’s Blog.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

Knopf, Howard. Excess Copyright [blog].
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/

McCutcheon, Mark A. Academicalism [blog].
http://academicalism.wordpress.com/

Ministry of Canadian Heritage. “Fair Dealing in Canada.” Ottawa: Government of Canada, 22 May 2009.
http://www.canadianheritage.gc.ca/pc-ch/org/sectr/ac-ca/pda-cpb/publctn/cch-2007/102-eng.cfm

Supreme Court of Canada. Judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada [database]. Lexum/Supreme Court of Canada.
http://scc.lexum.org/en/

Woodmansee, Martha. Intellectual property and the Construction of Authorship [course syllabus]. Case Western Reserve U, n.d.
http://www.case.edu/affil/sce/authorship/syllabus.html

The stakes of literary criticism

The stakes of literary criticism sometimes turn out to be higher than prevailing preconceptions about it would suggest (you know, the preconceptions involving elbow patches, overpaid obscurantism, and social irrelevance). For instance, earlier this year a New York law professor faced criminal libel charges in France for publishing a critical book review. Around the same time, a Kuwaiti blogger got sued for posting a bad restaurant review.

The counter-discourse about literary criticism as a matter of life or death has roots in the pamphlet and periodical hostilities that marked (and marred) print culture in the Romantic period. The most famous example is the poet Keats, famously sensitive to critical reviews. “Who killed John Keats?” asked Byron in 1821, promptly answering on behalf of one particularly persecuting periodical: “‘I,’ says the Quarterly…”

But Keats’ case is still figurative, not literal, after all: it wasn’t bad reviews that actually killed Keats — it was tuberculosis, whose close reading skills apply only to deconstructing the ambiguities and aporias of the body’s immune system. Rather, the real life-or-death stakes of literary criticism surface in the fact that most negative reviews themselves were published anonymously — as were numerous now-famous novels, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Walter Scott’s Waverley series, to Austen’s oeuvre. As William St Clair argues in his endlessly absorbing study The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, “anonymity protected publishers and printers from the law of libel” (174).

Perhaps that’s a protection that some of the aforementioned present-day critics wish they had, just as, perhaps, it’s a protection that explains the death of netiquette and the ubiquity of commentating trolls. But anonymity warded against more than just libel in the romantic period:

Anonymity also reduced the risk of being called out to fight in a duel, a form of literary criticism which killed more than one writer of the romantic period. (175)

Such wryly observed literary history puts in perspective “the death of the author,” reminding us of a time when an act of reading represented a kind of re-writing that was radically and literally tantamount to murder (not even murder most foul, but murder socially sanctioned, at that). Let’s hope that, amidst increasingly extremist, neoliberal forms of deregulation, IP law enforcement, and extreme sports (like ultimate fighting or chessboxing), the current spate of libel actions against critics doesn’t augur a return to the good old bad old days when running an unfavourable critique could risk catching a bullet.

Cross-blogged from the AU Landing

Before the Law: Histories of Copyright

You must imagine, at the eventual heart of things to come, linked or integrated systems or networks of computers capable of storing faithful simulacra of the entire treasure of the accumulated knowledge and artistic production of past ages…
–Benjamin Kaplan, 1967

Research for a talk I’ll be giving at #Congress11 includes reading some excellent studies of copyright in (or as) the history of literature. These studies share a couple of principles: they recognize the historical contingency of intellectual property law (it’s nothing natural), and they assert the fundamentally social character of all cultural production, in contrast to IP law’s attribution of it to individual “originality” (an attribution based on Romantic ideas of authorship). Mark Rose puts the matter succinctly in Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright:

The persistence of the discourse of original genius implicit in the notion of creativity [...] obscures the fact that cultural production is always a matter of appropriation and transformation [...] What finally underwrites the [modern copyright] system, then, is our conviction about ourselves as individuals. [...] Copyright stands squarely on the boundary between private and public. (135, 139-40)

Paul Saint-Amour builds on Rose and other scholars in emerging cultural-economic fields — New Economic Criticism and Critical Cultural Legal Studies — to study copyright in Victorian and modern literature; however, his context is insistently that of the post-millennial copyfight, and he notes the contradictions of critiquing copyright on its own terms, through strategies of appropriation and infringement (like DJing, which I’ll be discussing elsewhere at Congress):

You can seldom criticize the law by breaking it and yet expect the law to forgive your infraction as criticism. Law is not an argument so much as an instrument of self-enforcement; thus, even breaking the law confirms the logic and categories of the law, which work to criminalize any transgressive act of dissent. In the case of property law, this circularity tightens further: criticizing standards of ownership can lapse into a near-absurdity when some of the most effective critical pathways — counterappropriation or parody, for example — are by definition already owned by someone else. (19-20)

(I was reminded of this comment when I found Martha Woodmansee’s syllabus for a course on “Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship,” with dozens of great readings made freely available for public download. If this is what fair use affords US educators, I’ll have what they’re having.)

The ability of the law to successfully prosecute infractions depends, in part, on how well the law makes itself seem natural, self-evident. Demystifying the self-evident naturalness of copyright law is a project of all these books, most ambitiously essayed in William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, a sweeping cultural-economic history that puts intellectual property law front and centre as a regulator of not just the publishing business, but also literary production and, most importantly, public access to reading.

Intellectual property has existed for so long that it is difficult to imagine a world without it, but it is not intrinsic to authorship, books, or reading as such, but it too came into existence in response to a conjuncture of economic circumstances which came together in the late fifteenth century. [...] The intellectual property regime has changed frequently and drastically over the centuries. [...] During the intervals when the normal intellectual property structures temporarily broke down, we can see that the whole economy of writing and reading immediately changed. (41)

So are we taking part, now, in a breakdown of IP structures, or in their further entrenchment? It can be bewildering and discouraging that the answers vary so wildly. Last week, copyright lawyer Howard Knopf blogged about Margaret Atwood’s comments on Bill C-32, which heighten “creator-vs.-educator” hostilities, and suggest misconceptions about IP law basics like fair dealing (which are especially troubling to see being expressed by such a major author). Histories of copyright bring some much-needed perspective to present debates so pressured by private-interest spin, by reminding us that copyright was invented to advance the public interest, and by suggesting ways to re-assert the priority of that interest and reclaim the cultural common wealth.

Works Cited
Kaplan, Benjamin. An Unhurried View of Copyright. New York: Columbia UP, 1967.
Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.
Saint-Amour, Paul K. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003.
St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.