I came across an article on Mashable about a woman named Jamie Thomas-Rasset who was charged with copyright infringement. She had to pay the recording industry a fatal sum of 1.92 million dollars, or $80,000 for every song that she illegally downloaded. The writer covering this story said that the sentence was retarded, for how on earth could 24 songs be worth that much? What really piqued my interest was not the nett value of the songs, but more about the idea of copyright as the universal code of ‘originality’. Does it uphold the pristine framework of authorship (i.e. as creator and owner of the work) or does it staple a price tag on whoever wants to copy it? From the obvious trends of the last century, it’s quite clear it’s more of the latter. To make matters worse, torrents, streaming, and all other social networking sites are throwing these pecuniary interests into chaos.
So what is the definition of ‘author’ and ‘work’ in this age of digital communication? Before we can comprehend the controversies of the present, I think it might help if we look to the past on how we have gained (or lost) the right to copy.
There are two significant epochs crucial to the author’s development, namely the pre-print (oral, written) period and the post-print. According to literary critic Andrew Bennett, the development of print culture, or the production of texts in a standardized form, had revolutionised earlier concepts of creativity. Prior to this, all artistic works (e.g. song and literature) were defined through a process of repetition. Through copying and modification, these works became a tradition in their own right. From Homer’s IIliad and Odyseey, to the Ramayana and Karma Sutra. Copying wasn’t just free; it was the only way to ensure these ideas were not forgotten.
With the advent of print, the reproduction of ideas was in turn mechanised. As a reaction to the uniformity or duplicity of the work, ‘individuality’ became the buzzword of the Romantic period. In other words, it wasn’t about preserving ideas anymore (the printing machines took care of that anyway). Rather it was dealing with ‘creative invention’, or to make something of nothing. Even then, the author only embraced creativity on its own terms; commercialising the work was an act of aesthetic violation.
In this context, copyright was seen as the ultimate solution to the economic problems of the creative industry. If there were no patrons and the creator was passionately in love with the work, what other option was there? One couldn’t just let the person starve right? Copyright was thus highly instrumental, insofar as the publisher’s profits and author’s position were concerned.
What’s taking place today is perhaps an erosion of these earlier paradigms that still continue to assert their primacy. Streaming, downloading, digital copying were never novel tools that the Internet gave birth to. They have always been around ever since human beings learnt how to talk. Web 2.0, however, gives users a fast and simplified extension of such functions. Copying and adopting the work of others as our own has always been a natural response when we see the need to preserve ideas, and I think that such a practice is worth more than a gazillion songs put together.
