Copyright!
You Can Ignore It
Until a Subpoena Says You Can’t.
by Wally Lee Parker
As you might imagine, it’s been a
tough month-and-a-half at my house (since I wasn’t here most of the time, that
viewpoint’s somewhat metaphoric in nature).
In early May I had just finished printing up my last issue as the Mortarboard’s
editor, I’d put together the magazine version as well as the multiple issue bound version, that being Collected Newsletters #50, and had gotten both
boxed up for Bill Sebright when I had several stroke events in series – events
I remember very little of except that I was at home and needed to call my son
for assistance. I wish I could say I
hadn’t seen something like this coming.
But for the last half year I’ve had an intuitive impression that
maintaining the clockwork routine necessary to keep the Mortarboard on
schedule was something I probably wouldn’t be able to continue for much longer
– said resulting in me notifying the group via my notes as submitted at the
society’s February 2022 meeting and subsequently published in the March (12th)
2022 Mortarboard that I would be resigning as editor, effective May 14th,
2022. That premonition and subsequent
timeline proved factual, and the day the May Mortarboard was officially
released was just one of a drowsy undifferentiated cluster I spent confined at
Sacred Heart Hospital.
I still don’t have the timeline
straight, but it appears my daughter, over from her home in Gig Harbor, was the
one that handed society president Bill Sebright the box of May Mortarboards
and such when he stopped at my home in north Spokane. I spent the rest of May in hospital and like facilities
and was released home on June 8th.
I’ve suffered a constant barrage of home-health people since, and only
now am getting anywhere near (and incidentally not that near) my normal. The rest of summer - and I expect well into
autumn - is going to be a bazaar of various procedures, supposedly resulting in
a stabilization of my condition, said condition being a mixture of cardiac,
blood pressure, and cerebral related problems.
The possibility of making it through without further damage isn’t
certain – though not overly gloomy.
I’m just going to mention a couple of
things related to the deluge of issues I’m dropping on the new editor. The new editor also works for a living. I’d been retired for a full year when I
initiated the monthly Mortarboard.
Prior to the Mortarboard I’d also pasted together several years
of a family history newsletter of somewhat similar content – meaning none of
the problems and methodologies used in publishing a newsletter were new to
me. I’ve no idea what’s true of the
society’s new volunteer in that regard, other than the idea that she’s in the
printing business.
Regarding laying up the first few issues
of her version of the Mortarboard, I suggested I’d help where I could
(it turns out that was way too optimistic), but also offered some alternatives
she might want to consider. For one
thing, there’s no reason the Mortarboard must be published monthly. As long as all unpublished-to-date society
minutes are clustered in each new edition, going to press every two or three
months is a possibility. And also,
there’s no reason the Mortarboard has to be a one-person operation. If there were a willing staff, the editor
could take the more traditional role of managing, while the staff looked after
the departments and such.
From the beginning the Mortarboard
was designed to be built by folding 8½x14 inch sheets of legal paper in a
manner that each would create two leaves with four pages. Every extra sheet of paper added would result
in four more pages. As a practical
matter, since said sheets would all have to be saddle bound by stapling down
the center fold, the resultant signature would need to be limited in thickness,
so I put an arbitrary limit of 24 pages (six sheets of paper) for any given
issue of the Mortarboard, and 64 pages for any given issue of the Collected
Newsletters – said collection simply being a somewhat more formal saddle-bound version
of the last several Mortarboards. That system allowed the Mortarboard to expand or contract its page-count month to month in response to the amount of material being submitted for print. And then to be reprinted as Collected Newsletters - a purchasable format containing all the magazine's back issues.
We could have worked through all these
points by now had not that cluster of small arteries on the left side of my
brain decided to rupture as well. As for
any suggestion that my brain could be blamed for every negative thing that’s
happened inside or outside the administrative wing of the historical society in
days past, that’s certainly an argument that can be made. After all, though I’m now just another member
with no executive powers whatsoever, I’m sure some of my trouble-causing
essence has seeped into the group’s underlying fabric.
For example, I’m going to mention a phrase
most amateur editors should dread. “Copyright”
– or more formally, “intellectual properties” - this being a burr of
widespread irritation among most everyone involved in publishing.
Since we are involved in condensing local
history into print, I’ll try to place my assertions regarding our
responsibilities when it comes to intellectual properties within a bit of
historical context, and I would recommend that any argumentative conversations
or illuminations regarding the accuracy of such be drawn from verifiable
sources rather than common knowledge – common knowledge being a source any
practiced historian, amateur or otherwise, should have discovered to be consistently
unreliable.
It seems the founding fathers of these
United States, in order to promote within the new republic an environment
conducive to an intellectual bloom of the arts and sciences, wrote into the
Constitution of the United States of America a provision that directed the
people’s congress to create a statutory system by which citizens who draw up
from their own inventiveness things such as works of literature, scientific and
industrial processes, and all sorts of other things that might advance said
arts and sciences, be provided by law with a specified period of time during
which they would have the right to exclusively or by contract profit from the manufacture
and/or other monetary returns any such creations generate. First codified in the Patent Act of 1790, these
codes have been a work in progress ever since.
Their purpose, as clarified in the revised Patent Act of 1793, is to
provide statutory protection for (quote) “any new and useful art, machine,
manufacture or composition of matter and any new and useful improvement on any
art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter,” (end quote) with a
bias toward protecting the interest of the inventors and/or owners of such
described “art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter.” Knowing the nature of lawyers, it would be
reasonable to assume that the legal arguments on this and that point left
dangling within said statutes began almost immediately, and clearly in the ensuing
231 years such contentions were often and still are being bounced about
whenever some degree of profit by legal or otherwise manipulation of such seems
possible.
I have heard the word communism used
in relation to the concept of copyright in that it might be inhibiting to free
speech - especially if said string of free speech happens to have been created
and therefore, due to still being within the age limit imposed by its
registered date of creation, owned by someone else. After all, copyright does contend that ideas expressed
as specific strings of words can be owned – novels, short stories, newspaper
articles, poems, lyrics. But like a lot
of things when viewed from a base build on a solid bedrock of willful and self-serving
ignorance, actual meanings often get muddled.
The concept of intellectual property is propped against one of the
foundational roots of capitalism – in that it asserts that ideas, processes and
so forth can be privately owned. What
makes this genius is that within the statutory system initiated by our founding
fathers said copyright eventually dissolves, and title to said intellectual
property becomes the common property of everyone. And as these bits of once private property
become part of the public domain, they continue to serve as the founding
fathers intended by enriching an environment supportive of an ongoing
intellectual bloom within the collective domain of the publicly owned arts and
sciences.
It seems those founding fathers were a
lot sharper than certain moderns give them credit.
Now if you’re a speed reader, and only
read the first sentence of every paragraph, or every other line in said
paragraph, or simply consume the essence of each paragraph by inhalation of the
page’s psychic essence, please stop. Copyright
– like anything heavily peppered with fact - is not a concept intended for
psychic consumption. And worse yet, if
you’re intent is to find some easy way around 231 plus years (and soon to be
232 plus years) of legal president, and ignoring one or more such legal principles
draws the ire of someone who happens to own title to a piece of intellectual
material you are thieving – most likely such thieving being generated by little
more than limped laziness – it’s within the realm of possibility that you’re
about to find out what it’s like to be summonsed into a civil courtroom at the
behest of some entity – person or corporation - who has all the spuds in their
potentially very deep pockets and are justifiably as mad as hell.
If someone thinks that the
respondent’s side of a courtroom is a good place to be, said someone, and all
that have advised him or her, are blithering idiots. To get there, all you need do is keep
ignoring the strictures imposed by copyright.
You might ride through your years of publishing various materials just
fine, with nary a complaint. If you do,
then I must be wrong, and you must be right – or lucky (and I’d vote for the
latter). But say a subpoena does
arrive. From what I can tell, the
consensus among those who say copyright is crap is that at first you should act
offended, and then treat the whole thing as a joke.
Now the wise thing to do – and the last
thing anyone in the above camp would consider - would be to obtain the services
of a lawyer with knowledge of copyright.
One might suspect that at some point there would be a necessity for some
contact between opposing judicial combatants, so I’d hazard the suggestion that
it’d be nice to have someone other than a jingoistic idiot representing your
side. This of course is going to cost
money, and quite possibly an appearance in court during which you will need to explain
to the satisfaction of a legal system that has been dealing with issues of
patent and copyright for something over two and a quarter-centuries why the
regulations you’ve infringed upon are essentially communistic hornswoggle therefore
deserving to be ignored.
(“But I don’t understand. When we left the tavern last night our
arguments sounded bulletproof.”)
My last little bit of advice regarding any
appearance before the legal system on a charge of copyright infringement would
be to bring a checkbook. No matter how
you slice it, someone – and most probably the infringer – is going end up
having to pay. And even more
importantly, it’s unlikely to stop there.
In the society’s case the potential fallout is the destruction of a once
viable historical group, a destruction that might include every bit of effort
everyone has poured into the job of collecting, cataloging, and displaying
local history over years past.
Desirous of leaving one small glimmer of
hope, I’m going to suggest something be prominently added to each issue of the
society’s publications in order to clarify the society’s position on copyright,
“It is the responsibility of every author submitting materials –
quotes, diagrams, images, artwork, maps, etc. - containing content created by persons
or entities other than the author him or herself, to secure all necessary
copyright permissions for the use of said materials in the work the author is
submitted to us for publication.”
While reason and prudence will still need to be applied in all cases, this hopefully
shifts the burden of obtaining clearances for materials that may have
pre-existing copyrights from the society’s editor and his or her staff to the
author submitting such materials, which is exactly where such a burden deserves
to be.
