I read an excellent article in the NYT magazine on Sunday about Lewis Hyde, who wrote "The Gift." Has anyone read it? The article is long and discusses many points about art and literature.
I did learn about the "copy left," also called the "free culture movement." They despise what they call the " corporate land grab" where, often in the guise of protecting the artist, restrictions are put on works of art. Here is an excellent example:
quote:
Over dinner not long ago, he told me about the legal fate of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson died in 1886, but it was not until 1955 that an “official” volume of her collected works was published, by Harvard University Press. The length of copyright terms has expanded substantially in the last century, and Harvard holds the exclusive right to Dickinson’s poems until 2050 — more than 160 years after they were first written. When the poet Robert Pinsky asked Harvard for permission to include a Dickinson poem in an article that he was writing for Slate about poetic insults, it refused, even for a fee. “Their feeling was that once the poem was online, they’d lose control of it,” Hyde told me.
How absurd! Besides, what's to stop me from quoting the poem right here?
Copyright is fighting a losing battle against the internet, I fear. Although it seems unfair (but who said life was fair?) when it costs nothing to take someone's intellectual property, duplicate it and send it to the world without risk to oneself, then that is what will happen.
Although I can understand the pain of the creators, I can's see that wholesale copying will stifle creation, and I can believe that creators will find new ways of being rewarded to what they do.
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
