What Would Dickens Do? - Industry Trend or Event

Industry Standard, The, July 30, 2001 by Julene Snyder

A FAMILIAR COPYRIGHT FIGHT PLAYED OUT 160 YEARS AGO.

How will the battles over online copyright end? Ask a famous Victorian novelist. That's the idea David G. Post tossed out at a recent MP3 conference. "I'm encouraged by the story of Charles Dickens, who was as angry about copyright smuggling and A border permeability BEAT as Metallica is," says Post, an associate professor of law at Temple University and co-founder and co-director of the Cyberspace Law Institute. In the mid-l9th century, copyright laws of other countries did not apply in the U.S. So the work of British writers like Dickens was "freely reproduced, distributed and shared." Sounds familiar.

U.S. authors eventually discovered Dickens' problem was theirs, too -- American books were being pirated in England. Plus, Post says, the lack of copyright made it hard to compete: "Who would pay a dollar for Melville when you could get Dickens for a nickel?"

Ultimately, Americans were persuaded that Dickens' copyright should be respected in the U.S., and, adds Post, the same should happen in the debates of online copyright protection: "The inhabitants of cyberspace have to be convinced that it's in their interest to grant recognition to the foreign copyrights of Metallica." (With the free Napster all but dead, the band has stopped beating up on it.)

Post has his own proposal for speeding up the process: Ignore the copyrights of those who create works in cyberspace. For example, if you make Napster's file-sharing technology freely available -- with or without the companys consent -- a call for reciprocal copyright protection of intellectual property might follow.

While that scenario may be far-fetched, it's clearly time to take a break from the bombast and figure out some workable solutions to the copyright conundrum. Post has come up with a good starting point to begin the conversation anew.

Julene Snyder (julene@well.com) is a writer in San Diego.