The Right To Copy
Es folgt aus aktuellem Anlass ein kurzer Kommentar zu Kevin Kellys Artikel „Scan This Book!“ (NYT May 14, 2006) den ich unlängst im Rahmen einer (auf englisch abgehaltenen) Philosophie-Lehrveranstaltung verfasst habe.
The universal library of Google?
Kevin Kelly dreams of having “in one place all knowledge, past and present”. The universal library. New technologies and companies that use them could make this old dream of mankind come true, he argues. What he refers to is the effort of Google (and others) to scan every book they can, index them and make them searchable. It’s obvious that publishers as well as authors overall are not reacting as euphoric as Kelly does to this efforts, as they undermine what we today call Copyright and everything that is connected to it.
Despite all cultural conflicts between the parties (e.g. “only a printed copy in my hands feels good” versus “I like to find everything online even on the bus”) there is one major issue: business. Most publishers make a good living by copying books (and promote the copies) and many authors can, due to a contract with a publisher, make a living with selling (and promoting) their work. If they like it and if they are good (and or lucky) enough they will go on writing books. That’s basically the idea behind the concept of copyright – promoting the progress of arts/science by securing the authors the exclusive right to their work (at least for a limited time). They can sell it to publishers, but despite that, no one is allowed to just take the work and sell copies of it without the permission of the author. If someone makes them available online (for free), the established model collapses.
And that is, what Kelly argues for. He describes lots of benefits, such as bringing knowledge to the “underbooked” or how everyone would benefit if all books would be available as Hypertext with lots of links. Therefore, and for historical narration, he uses most of the space of the article, but towards the end he finally rises the question for a business model, as no one can seriously believe that authors and scientists would keep working for free (and die from starvation).
Kelly states that there is a “clash of business models” as new technologies changes not only markets but our whole culture. He believes that creative people have to change the model of how they earn money away from selling their work, as in the new models copies are no longer cheap but free. Selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions (of what? If copies are free, only few persons have to or will pay, TK)” is what Kelly suggests. Authors and scientists should entertain a community? To me, that doesn’t sound like the old idea of giving someone who already produced something good the opportunity to do it again.
There comes the Wikipedia as an argument. The Wikipedia is a successful work of a large community where people contribute as they wish and take what they need. Kelly writes that “Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book.” I guess he suggests we should imagine what would happen if all books would be available online to the public, if great things like the Wikipedia emerged without them being there. Integrating all the books would be an enormous amount of work that probably couldn’t be done in any other way, that’s right. Linking all books would create new connections between information, new ways to find information, but no new information, as also the Wikipedia does only collect information (work that is already done, most of it in fields that are protected by Copyright). The idea of connection information is great and I’m pretty sure it will happen in one way or another, but this doesn’t answer a very serious question that would be raised if there were no Copyright: Where do new inputs come from? Research for a huge article in the Wikipedia is sure a lot of work, but most likely nothing compared to the efforts that had to be taken to create/discover/etc. whatever the article describes.
With the new business models suggested by Kelly, only best-selling authors (who can sell pictures of them watching TV or whatever) would have the resources to write another book. That’s a problem Kelly doesn’t even think about.
Another question that arises is the control over all the books. Just because they are online and you don’t have to pay for them, they are not free. Someone controls the technology to connect and search them, even if it’s Open Source, as someone has to pay for the entire infrastructure. The leading part in digitalizing books is taken by Google, a gigantic corporation (and after Google comes Amazon, another gigantic corporation). Why should we trust Google as it has already proven that it cooperates with dictatorships in cases of censorship to maximize its profit? Also Goggle already is nearly a Monopolist for searching the Web with all the cons of monopolies. That is especially in questions of privacy issues frightening, as Google knows a lot of everyone who searches the Web with their search engine, goes to sites with ads from Google, and maybe uses Google Mail and so on. And to this Monopolist all the knowledge of the world should be given? That doesn’t sound like “public domain” to me, more to replace a few bad guys (the publishers) with one very powerful and probably bad guy. If we talk of a huge collection of books online as a library, maybe we should think about who provides public libraries today offline.
Beside these practical questions, there is also a philosophical dimension. Basically the question “who owns a work?” is a moral one. That’s usually the ground laws are made on. The current Copyright laws state that the creator owns the work. That sounds simple and fair. The person to decide what you have to do to be allowed using a work, manipulate it or whatever is the creator.
Kelly seems to make completely different assumptions. He writes that “The desire of all creators is for their work to find their way into all minds”. I doubt that, however even if its true, that doesn’t mean the creators want there work to get there for free or manipulated or to be manipulated there. This argument sounds as Kelly doesn’t want any Copyright at all. I’m not sure how to interpret his writings, so I won’t follow that path. Instead, for the rest of this text, I will focus on the questions of ownership.
In his essay “Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books”1 Immanuel Kant defends the right of the author as owner to decide over any publication, reproduction, translation, etc. of the work. He states the “author’s property in his thoughts“ without any further argumentation, an than gives reasons for the Copyright of the author.
Kevin Kelly on the other hand seems to think of any kind of creative work as an entity that independently of how and by whom it was created belongs per se to the public. When criticising the US Copyright law of 1976 he writes that this law has “made it extremely difficult to move a work into the public commons, where human creations naturally belong and were originally intended to reside (Accentuation by me, TK)”. This is pretty hard stuff, especially when you give no reasons for it.
Not that it can’t be that way, but why should or must it be so? If we accept that there are cultures where work simply is seen without having an author it could belong to, this is no reason for us to adopt our laws and our culture (evolutionists may argue “look how developed they are, and how developed we are. Indeed there are anthropologists that say that private property was one of the most important developments for the advancement of our civilisation).
More important, philosophy since David Hume’s guillotine knows, that what is per se does not provide any reason for what ought to be. Kelly writes the quoted text as if it were a simple descriptive statement. But it is not. As it states what should be, it’s a prescriptive statement that would need adequate arguments. Kelly hover seems to use it as premises and as conclusion.
Kevin Kelly argues against Copyright (at least a strict on) with the vision he has of the universal library. He describes problems of the current system of publishers being in control. These problems are real and they are an argument for changing the system. But as I’ve tried to show, a quick and radical solution like giving all books to Google and trust them to provide them searchable for the public (that’s very simplified) would on the one hand solve problems with the publishers (by destroying them), but on the other hand cause a lot of new problems, especially a lack of resources (and motivation) for authors to create new work.
Maybe there will be a solution like it seems to develop for musicians, of using the web to get directly in touch with the costumer. That way they bypass the publishers, which are let alone with the really big artists. The Web can solve the problem (and destroy the publishers) with keeping the Copyright intact, with benefits for the author (what the customer pays belongs to him) and the customer (without the publisher, works can be way cheaper). However, even if this way proofs to be completely stupid, it seems far more realistic then giving up Copyright and handing over Google (or a few other corporations) the “key to knowledge” (this way would be a kind of a grassroot movement which on the web tend to be far more successful then changes ordered top-down).
PS: Wer meint inhaltliche Kritik durch Kritik an meinem Englisch ersetzen zu müssen, richtet sich selbst.
