the monster called “exclusive rights” which result from the mixing
of subjects of different natures.
“Somebody is going to undercut the price”—what is so tragic
about this when we talk business? It is a simple question. What is the
honest answer? “OK.” It would be OK for any other branch of
business. It would be OK in publishing too. So why would publishers
(through copyright) want to mutually restrict each other from
profiting? Yet another question: If an author simply sells his work to
a publisher, how does copyright help him? Does it not?
Well, I have hinted more than once that I am not satisfied with
the commonly accepted speculations about exclusive rights,
regardless of how long those speculations have been around.
Options for Governing Culture
In order to understand what is happening in the regulation of cultural affairs and what could ideally happen, I have framed three options for analysis: (1) no regulation at all, (2) the current type of regulation and (3) an ideal regulation, corresponding to the nature of culture. These are: Self-tuning, Copyright, and Authoright.
Self-tuning
This means there is no copyright nor any other specific regulation of cultural affairs. There is a rather close historical precedent for this situation. In Jacobinian France, for a short period of time (until 1793) all royal publishing privileges were abolished. It would be very helpful to find out what exactly was going on with book market in France at that time. And earlier there was a somewhat similar situation in Great Britain when royal privileges were, for a certain period of time, ignored by small printers, causing big ones to press for a law like the Statute of Anne. What was going on in that market? Such a study merits research.
Copyright
This is the universal publishing monopoly. It is the ownership, similar to private property, which is imposed upon cultural phenomena. This regime was introduced despite public outcry in Great Britain in 1710. I will discuss it more below.
