Julianna Yau’s blog

Today, I attended Mark Rose’s lecture on The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright. I was probably not able to appreciate the full effect of the lecture because of my limited knowledge of 17th and 18th century British history and literature. However, I knew enough to wonder why we are still dealing with the same types of problems which were around back then and why so many of us are trying to deal with problems that we think are relatively new, but could in fact be seen as being well over 500 years old.

Rose positioned us to think about “the public sphere” by contrasting the private sphere of the family and the sphere of the state, and where the pubic sphere involved private people coming together as the pubic. This was the grounds upon which we were to think about the emergence of copyright because Milton saw publishing as an act between the author and the public. This is also useful for us to keep in mind in this time where the concept of Private is suffering from an identity crisis.

The crash-course in copyright from that time took us from the English press regulation through the Star Chamber, to the Chamber’s abolishment, to the licensing and copyright demands brought by the Stationer’s Company, to the birth of the Statute of Anne.

Some things from Rose’s lecture which have modern-day parallels:

• a publisher’s (Stationer’s Company) use of the interest of creators (Milton) to support their own interests (protection of the publisher’s profit; in this case, Milton’s response came in the form of his work, Areopagitica) in times where the publishers’ role in the production and distribution of works was becoming uncertain
• pre-publication censorship via the Licensing Order, and the muddling of the line between copyright and censorship
• the Licensing Order also used as a tool for the protection of well-ordered printing, not the protection of the author’s income
• the collapse of press control and the end of licensing (in the pre-publication censorship context) as a precursor to the public sphere and more independent publications (particularly after the Licensing Order lapsed)
• the Statute of Anne as giving authors, not their publishers, the right over their works
• the preamble of the Licensing Order and the preamble of Statute of Anne having different focuses; the former was to prevent undesirable actions and the latter was to encourage learning

In the discussion following the lecture, there was also mention of the work of Oren Bracha, and in particular his forthcoming publication which deals with the transformation of the doctrine of copyright toward one of financial gain. Supposedly, the unfinished paper is available on his website, but the closest thing I could find is 75 pages of excerpts on the U of Texas website. I think that work will be very valuable to my ongoing study on copyright, and although it may be useful now, I’ll wait for the full publication (and hope I have time to read it by the time it’s available).

Over and over again in my notes from the lecture are questions to myself which are some variation of “why are we still dealing with the same conceptual problems?”. Some other questions the lecture raised for me were:

• why does copyright have a history of being used as a tool of censorship?
• how do the concepts of censorship, copyright, authorship, ownership fit together?
• how does the concept of ownership differ from the 17th/18th century and today (if at all)?
• how can we deal with the differences in and relationship between the concepts of intellectual, performance and physical property?

What was also mentioned near the end was the problems we are now facing because we took a piece of legislation which was meant to protect the right to copy and layered authors’ rights on top of it (and, I’d like to point out, other creators’ rights). This made me smile because of my exercise in deconstructing copyright and my move to categorize creators’ rights on their on (separate from, but probably encompassing, copyright).

What else made me smile? Larry Lessig being named as a modern-day Milton in terms of copyright activism (with a footnote that Milton was a better writer… although I think that may be true of almost any blogger or writer of our day, myself certainly included!).

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