Talk of “Copyright Wars” suggests landmark cases such as Pope v. Curl or Authors’ Guild v. Google. Though Peter Baldwin discusses these, and others, his wars lie beyond the courtroom. Similarly, his central antagonists, Germany and the Anglo-Saxon countries, take us to unexpected venues. It is not Versailles but Berne where treaties are negotiated, and instead of Allied triumph, we hear of its capitulation. Copyright Wars details the rise to domination of the European views of copyright, with their embrace of inalienable and eternal “moral rights.” In the process, the book challenges other standard assumptions. The Disney Corporation and Hollywood—long vilified for extending the period of copyright indefinitely—appear as victims. The “often told story of American Cultural Hegemony,” Baldwin asserts, is all wrong (p. 260).
These “wars,” then, concern not so much the cases as the concept of copyright, and its development since the eighteenth century. The standard view can be seen in a claim made by Daniel Defoe in 1710 (the year of England's seminal Statute of Anne): “A Book is the Author's Property, ’tis the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his brain” (Defoe's Review, Feb. 2, 1710). A little unsettling, the metaphor nonetheless suggests that the implied parental control is limited—books, like children, grow up and become independent—as the Statute of Anne mandated. By contrast, Samuel Johnson felt that the author had a “metaphysical right” that, derived from authorial “creation, should from its nature be perpetual.” But Johnson recognized, pragmatically, that “the consent of nations . . . and the interests of learning were against it” (James Boswell, Life of Johnson, May 8, 1773).
Different national approaches to copyright reflect these early views. While the Anglo-Saxons had originally seen it as a matter of common law, the Statute of Anne subjected it to statutory law (Johnson's “consent”). In Europe, by contrast, copyright came to be seen as a matter of inviolable “natural law” (Johnson's “metaphysical right”), impervious to statute and potentially “perpetual.” Which stance the antagonists took, Baldwin argues, was “swaddled” in national-cultural assumptions (p. 44). Europeans favored a “romantic” view of the author's inalienable claim, Anglo-Saxons a pragmatic and democratic belief in the people's greater right to their “cultural patrimony” (p. 409).
As such comments suggest, Baldwin has strong views, which he backs with strong prose and a commanding grasp of the relevant literature and language. Though he is not a lawyer, his work reads like a court brief, with praise accruing to one side and condemnation to the other. Europeans appear as either naïve or self-serving villains. Association with Italian Fascists and German Nazis helps indict moral rights. Anglo-Saxons, by contrast, appear fundamentally democratic and egalitarian. When U.S. slaveholders are introduced, it is to ally them with the Europeans. American copyright piracy reflects a “purposeful attempt to jumpstart a new, more enlightened and democratic polity” (p. 114). When European publishing houses are mentioned, they are monopolies. When Google is mentioned, it is a champion of the public sphere. At base, Baldwin assumes that “information wants to be free” and that the Anglo-Saxons pursued that goal until succumbing to Berne. Europeans, in his view, had no such interests.
For all their partiality, Baldwin's ideas have particular significance for business history as the field increasingly embraces matters of information. Alfred Chandler's role as editor of A Nation Transformed by Information (2000) implicitly called on us to reconsider his seminal business history in informational terms. And before that, James Beniger's Control Revolution (1986) asked us to assess Chandler's turning point, the Second Industrial Revolution, from an informational perspective. The topic, though still rather ill defined, now reaches well beyond conventional histories of libraries, publishing, and intellectual property.
To help us reconsider information, Baldwin pushes us away from Europe's “romantic author.” A reappraisal of copyright history, and the new world of “digitality” (with the curious corroboration of postmodern theory) challenge the idea of the lone author as an individual and autonomous creator, resituating notions of originality and inspiration in a larger, social context that affirms social rather than individual rights to the information produced.
The move is important. Nonetheless, step too far and we might be in danger of replacing the romantic author with “romantic information.” Moral rights, for all their problems, reflect ways in which information may not easily be made “free.” The notions of “attribution” (the right to be recognized as the instigator of the work) and “integrity” (the author's right to prevent changes), which are reaffirmed by moral rights, have value not only for the author, but also for the recipient. Information cannot speak for itself and tends to rely on Foucault's “author function” to assert its integrity. As information goes global, Baldwin argues, moral rights are undermined, because the attribution right, for example, “assumes a large measure of shared cultural background” (p. 272). But meaning, too, assumes such a background, and attribution and integrity can help locate it.
Thus, while Baldwin sees “digitality” taking us away from such arcane rights, it might be taking us in the other direction. Wikipedia, which renounced academic authority early on, now increasingly relies on that authority to give credence to its articles. The chaotic mélange of the early Google Books project, admired by Baldwin, needed HathiTrust and the Internet Archive and others to reassert integrity that Google had overlooked. Moreover, while Baldwin echoes the Google PR message about making information accessible, the project still seems to be closed to alternative search engines, only helping to consolidate the Google monopoly. Furthermore, while Baldwin sees digitality more generally pushing against property rights, resistance to informational monopolies supported by copyleft, open source, and Creative Commons depends on intellectual property and takes attribution seriously.
In sum, The Copyright Wars makes an important contribution, but it is one that perhaps takes its legal brief too restrictively. Binary judgments of guilty or innocent conclude that all moral rights should be condemned. Perhaps we need less of the courtroom and more arbitration. Aspects of moral rights—in particular, their indefinite extension and descent to authors’ heirs—should certainly be resisted; other aspects, such as attribution and integrity, perhaps not.
