A little potted history first. The idea of copyright arose initially in the 16th century with the advent of a new technology: the printing press. This was a revolutionary period in terms of content creation. What had previously been the province of the individual scholar hand-copying documents suddenly became a lot easier to do and a lot quicker. This is the essential difference that the printing press made. And, in England, the right to print these was governed by the Crown, and this was used to censor and suppress material that the Crown felt did not benefit it.

Through Letters Patent, the Crown allocated certain works to certain printers and those printers enjoyed the exclusive right to make copies of those works. Then, as now, there was fierce competition among those printers and several rogue printers (also known as “pirates” by the industry) made unauthorised copies and sold them to a populace hungry for the words. The authorised printers got together and formed the Stationers Guild, a “union” of sorts, and compiled the Stationers’ Register, a list of all works that had been approved and who was authorised to print them. In that way, they managed to regulate their industry.

This was all done in the name of the publisher, not the author. Authors could not get a look in until the 18th century, specifically with the Copyright Act of 1710 (also known as the Statute of Anne). And even that document is heavily weighted towards publishers, despite its opening paragraphs. In total it mentions “author” 5 times while “proprietor” (including “proprietor or proprietors” as one mention) gets 10 distinct mentions, one where it is placed as deliberately separate from “author”.

In Europe, French thinking revolved around the moral right of the author rather than the economic rights of the publisher. This culminated in 1877 with the Berne Convention on copyright. While England became a signatory to the convention, it did not implement legislation to fully comply until the 1980s. The United States and other former colonies of the British Empire inherited, through common law provisions, the English approach to copyright as an economic entity.

Of course you can get all this from Wikipedia, and Google. You can also get the fact that the American publishing industry was a “pirate” of European works from the 18th century to the middle of the 20th, but that’s another blog post.

But knowing how copyright came about doesn’t fully inform us as to what it is, here in the early 21st century. If we look at the language of the Statute of Anne, and the relevant bit of the US Constitution, we see a significant mention of time: copyright was only ever intended to apply for a limited time, and it was to encourage more output, not reward existing output. The idea was not that you’d write one book (for example) and live off that forever, but that the revenue from that book would finance your life while you wrote the next one.

That’s a very important point that seems to be lost on the copyright absolutists, who tend to regard copyright as a property right, because some have referred to it as “intellectual property”.

It isn’t property in the same way that your house is property or your car is property . It’s possibly more like your cat, which is only your property in your mind.

Copyright is a social contract: it’s a contract between the creator and society. The creator gets control over the use of any revenue from the work that they create. For a limited time. And that limit is important.

With every right comes an obligation. The obligation connected to the right to copy is to release it to society after that fixed limited time.

More in my next.

Russell Brown has been a media and ICT institution in NZ for forever. His early Hard News bulletins, broadcast on bFM, were syndicated in text through mailing lists and Usenet. Eventually, he set up Public Address as a host for a number of blogs, including Hard News. Initially it was one way traffic, with no comments, but he added the Public Address System 2 years ago and it’s now one of the best discussion places on the NZ web. I’ve been reading it for a while but only signed up to comment a little while ago. It’s addictive, especially when covering copyright issues. A week or so ago we were in the middle of a discussion and Russell said “Hmm, I should blog about that” to which I replied “I should set up a blog so I can blog about that”. To be fair to Russell, he tried to dissuade me, saying I should craft a guest post, but the seed had started to grow so I set about bringing this little entity to life.

So, why my own blog, when I could be guesting at PA? Because it offers me more freedom to develop themes, to explore possibilities, to boldly go where no blog – you get the picture.

So, here we are. I suspect most of this blog will be about copyright and IP, as there are major moves by governments around the world to tighten up this area, criminalizing infringers and generally pandering to the small percentage of copyright holders who make up the Industry (most of whom had little or no hand in the creation of the content to which their copyrights refer). There’s a thing called ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which is being negotiated by a number of governments, including NZ’s, which could seriously put a kink in the creation of a knowledge economy (and that’s a set of posts in itself!), but there’s also SECURE, Standards Employed by Customs for Uniform Rights Enforcement, which also targets IP and ‘piracy’.

What we’re seeing is a gradual enclosure of IP in the same way as land was enclosed in medieval times. When a commons disappears, the environment stultifies and becomes the perogative of the few. For this to happen to knowledge would be disastrous.

I was talking to a journalist recently about my fun with ACTA and he asked me “Why you? What’s your reason for doing this?” and I responded “Someone’s got to do it, and I have the skills and knowledge”.

We’ll see if that’s enough.