WEBVTT NOTE Resolution and Financial Independence: Wordsworth's Obsession with Copyright Laws 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.800 It's always a pleasure to speak at the Mises Institute. 2 00:00:04.800 --> 00:00:13.000 I regard myself as a lonely soldier on the remote outpost of literature for the sake 3 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:15.760 of Austrian economics. 4 00:00:15.760 --> 00:00:21.160 I'm always on the lookout of something in my field that might be relevant to Austrian 5 00:00:21.160 --> 00:00:26.960 economics, and I hope I found a subject today, namely copyright. 6 00:00:26.960 --> 00:00:32.360 This is a subject that has been of great interest to Austrian economics in recent years. 7 00:00:32.360 --> 00:00:37.120 I myself have been persuaded by the people who are opposed to intellectual property. 8 00:00:37.120 --> 00:00:44.000 I don't propose to go into the issue, but just to suggest how literary studies can actually 9 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:45.600 help us in this area. 10 00:00:45.600 --> 00:00:50.760 It's surprising how much good material is available on copyright. 11 00:00:50.760 --> 00:00:55.440 I brought along several books if people are interested in seeing them. 12 00:00:55.440 --> 00:00:56.840 Literature professors do study books. 13 00:00:56.840 --> 00:01:01.560 Study, The History of the Book, and a lot of good stuff has been written, at least on 14 00:01:01.560 --> 00:01:07.280 the history of copyright, without necessarily taking a position against it. But these books 15 00:01:07.280 --> 00:01:16.340 are very revealing. They, by going back to 1600, they show that copyright is a creation 16 00:01:16.340 --> 00:01:22.580 of the state from the beginning, that for at least two centuries, copyright solely existed 17 00:01:22.580 --> 00:01:27.700 for the Benefit of Publishers and not at all for authors, and above all that copyright 18 00:01:27.700 --> 00:01:35.100 was a system of licensing, that kings used it to determine what would and would not be 19 00:01:35.100 --> 00:01:40.740 published within their realm and to reward their favorites. Again, it's a long history, 20 00:01:40.740 --> 00:01:47.820 I won't attempt to go into it. It is interesting that it's only in the 18th century that copyright 21 00:01:47.820 --> 00:01:54.020 begins to be available to authors and it really is in the 19th century that the 22 00:01:54.020 --> 00:02:00.300 current sort of cultural theories behind copyright emerge and there's a lot of 23 00:02:00.300 --> 00:02:06.220 interesting scholarship on that subject and there's a overwhelming evidence that 24 00:02:06.220 --> 00:02:11.900 our modern notion of what an author is is a product of the Romantic period and 25 00:02:11.900 --> 00:02:16.140 Romantic ideology and that's why I'm going to focus today on the figure of 26 00:02:16.140 --> 00:02:17.460 of William Wordsworth. 27 00:02:18.460 --> 00:02:21.180 Now, when I was studying Romanticism in graduate school, 28 00:02:21.180 --> 00:02:24.420 I never expected to make this sentence, but here it goes. 29 00:02:24.420 --> 00:02:27.940 William Wordsworth was the Mickey Mouse of the 19th century. 30 00:02:29.520 --> 00:02:32.480 That is, you may have noticed that whenever Mickey Mouse 31 00:02:32.480 --> 00:02:35.040 threatens to come into the public domain, 32 00:02:35.040 --> 00:02:38.840 miraculously, Congress decides to extend copyright. 33 00:02:40.160 --> 00:02:44.400 And it turns out Wordsworth was the first example of this. 34 00:02:44.400 --> 00:02:51.000 This is what I was amazed to discover, that really the first parliamentary debate in England 35 00:02:51.000 --> 00:03:00.420 about extending copyright, it was at the time 14 to 28 years and then in 1842 it was expanded 36 00:03:00.420 --> 00:03:05.920 to 42 years or the author's lifetime plus seven years, whichever was longer. 37 00:03:05.920 --> 00:03:13.040 The debate over that copyright extension, the major act of copyright extension in the 38 00:03:13.040 --> 00:03:23.040 In the early 19th century, really the first time Parliament devoted itself specifically to the issue of the length of copyright was fought over William Wordsworth. 39 00:03:23.040 --> 00:03:37.040 A man named Sergeant Thomas Noon Tailford, a member of Parliament from Reading and a minor author, single-handedly raised the issue of copyright. 40 00:03:37.040 --> 00:03:43.040 in 1837, parliament moved slowly, it wasn't until 1842 that the extension of copyright 41 00:03:43.040 --> 00:03:44.840 was passed. 42 00:03:44.840 --> 00:03:52.080 He was a great admirer of Wordsworth, had written about him and indeed enlisted him 43 00:03:52.080 --> 00:03:53.500 in the cause. 44 00:03:53.500 --> 00:04:01.240 So this is a very interesting example of how we are reliving stories from the 19th century. 45 00:04:01.240 --> 00:04:07.600 When you go back, you see once again that the rhetoric of copyright extension was built 46 00:04:07.600 --> 00:04:13.440 around celebrating a great author and how much he needed money and how his children 47 00:04:13.440 --> 00:04:18.960 were going to go impoverished if his copyright wasn't extended and so on. 48 00:04:18.960 --> 00:04:25.400 So it's a very interesting case study in seeing at least how copyright is sold to legislative 49 00:04:25.400 --> 00:04:29.280 bodies and in the realm of public opinion. 50 00:04:29.280 --> 00:04:38.780 Now, as it turns out, it was not just a campaign on behalf of Wordsworth, but he was enlisted 51 00:04:38.780 --> 00:04:41.040 in it very actively. 52 00:04:41.040 --> 00:04:44.900 He wrote some 40 to 50 letters. 53 00:04:44.900 --> 00:04:52.840 Some appeared under his own name in newspapers in defense of this copyright extension. 54 00:04:52.840 --> 00:04:59.260 Some appeared anonymously as if there was this huge groundswell in favor of the copyright 55 00:04:59.260 --> 00:05:00.260 Extension. 56 00:05:00.260 --> 00:05:06.340 Moreover, he lobbied individual members of parliament, including Sir Robert Peel, and 57 00:05:06.340 --> 00:05:09.980 it didn't get any higher in those days than Sir Robert Peel. 58 00:05:09.980 --> 00:05:15.020 He's after all the guy that carried the anti-corn law legislation. 59 00:05:15.020 --> 00:05:21.220 And Wordsworth said he wouldn't organize a petition, but he'd happy to be to sign one, 60 00:05:21.220 --> 00:05:28.140 and a number of other authors signed, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Harriet Martino. 61 00:05:28.140 --> 00:05:33.140 Wordsworth was the only one who was actively engaged in this. 62 00:05:33.140 --> 00:05:38.480 The others were willing to sign petitions, but moreover, it's quite evident that Talford's 63 00:05:38.480 --> 00:05:45.100 arguments made in Parliament were very much derived from Wordsworth. 64 00:05:45.100 --> 00:05:47.500 But Wordsworth went even beyond this. 65 00:05:47.500 --> 00:05:50.860 He wrote a sonnet in favor of copyright. 66 00:05:50.860 --> 00:05:53.600 Now this is what I figure I can really contribute to you. 67 00:05:53.600 --> 00:05:59.200 You guys probably never dreamed a sonnet was ever written in favor of copyright. But here 68 00:05:59.200 --> 00:06:06.960 goes. This was written in May 1838 as the campaign was revving up in Parliament. It's 69 00:06:06.960 --> 00:06:14.120 called a plea for authors. Failing impartial measure to dispense to every suitor, equity 70 00:06:14.120 --> 00:06:20.160 is lame. And social justice, just think what Hayek would have thought, social justice being 71 00:06:20.160 --> 00:06:41.160 and Social Justice, stripped of reverence for natural rights, a mockery and a shame law, but a servile dupe of false pretense, if guarding grossest things from common claim, now and forever she, to works that came from mind and spirit, grudge a short-lived fence. 72 00:06:41.160 --> 00:06:45.160 That's what a 28-year copyright is, it's a short-lived fence. 73 00:06:45.160 --> 00:06:52.160 What? Length and privilege, a little tie for books? Yes! Heartless ones! Or be it proved 74 00:06:52.640 --> 00:06:57.200 that it is a fault in us to have lived and loved like others, with like temporal hopes 75 00:06:57.200 --> 00:07:03.680 to die, no public harm, that genius from a course be turned, and streams of truth dried 76 00:07:03.680 --> 00:07:07.960 up even at their source? 77 00:07:07.960 --> 00:07:12.500 Not the greatest sonnet ever written, I will tell you. If that wasn't enough though, Wordsworth 78 00:07:12.500 --> 00:07:19.180 Joseph really turned on the rhetoric and wrote another sonnet, a plea to his grandchild, 79 00:07:19.180 --> 00:07:24.820 sequel to a plea for authors. This is very hard to follow, so I'll basically say, I can't 80 00:07:24.820 --> 00:07:30.060 believe my grandchild will be so poor because I don't have copyrights that he'll be dumb 81 00:07:30.060 --> 00:07:35.940 and can't even read my books. Here it goes. Son of my buried son, see that's grandchild, 82 00:07:35.940 --> 00:07:40.880 son of my buried son, while thus thy hand is clasping mine, it saddens me to think how 83 00:07:40.880 --> 00:08:10.880 how want may press thee down, and with thee sink thy children left unfit through vain demand of culture, even to feel or understand my simplest lay, that to their memory may cling, hard fate, which happily need not be, did justice mold the statutes of the land, a book, time cherished and an honored name, are high rewards, but bound they nature's claim or reasons, no, hope spun in timid line from out the bosom of a modest home, 84 00:08:10.880 --> 00:08:16.680 then through unambitious years to come, my careless little ones, for thee and thine. 85 00:08:16.680 --> 00:08:22.840 Again, I think this is unique in the history of the world, poetry in favor of copyright 86 00:08:22.840 --> 00:08:28.640 extension. By the way, Wordsworth believed in perpetual copyright, but was willing to 87 00:08:28.640 --> 00:08:36.400 settle for 42 years plus seven. Now, it's interesting to examine the arguments that 88 00:08:36.400 --> 00:08:43.040 Wordsworth and Tailford, his mouthpiece, made on behalf of the extension of copyright. 89 00:08:43.040 --> 00:08:49.440 Because in many ways it's the inverse of the real issue of copyright. I mean that most 90 00:08:49.440 --> 00:08:57.300 authors make their money in the first few months of what they publish. It's very rare 91 00:08:57.300 --> 00:09:01.680 to go beyond that. But Wordsworth was in a different situation and it's something that 92 00:09:01.680 --> 00:09:11.160 really frustrated him. He was not selling well as a poet. He was selling decently, but 93 00:09:11.160 --> 00:09:18.040 he had this theory that his day would come. When Lyrical Ballads was first published, 94 00:09:18.040 --> 00:09:23.160 this volume he published anonymously with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798, he got 30 guineas 95 00:09:23.160 --> 00:09:30.160 for it, guineas a pound plus a shilling. For the 1800 second edition, he got a hundred 96 00:09:30.160 --> 00:09:35.520 Tell you how stupid my colleagues are. Some of them say, gee, look how little money he 97 00:09:35.520 --> 00:09:43.200 got for his book, 100 pounds. Well, they've never heard of inflation or deflation. You 98 00:09:43.200 --> 00:09:49.400 know, 100 pounds, it's hard to estimate, it's worth at least $20,000 today, probably more. 99 00:09:49.400 --> 00:09:56.400 You could live decently for 150 pounds a year. That was a middle class income. So Wordsworth 100 00:09:56.400 --> 00:10:02.720 Wordsworth was getting almost a year's income, I wonder if he split it with Coleridge, but 101 00:10:02.720 --> 00:10:11.520 what annoyed him was Thomas More was getting £3,000 for Lala Rook, that Walter Scott was 102 00:10:11.520 --> 00:10:20.320 getting £35,000 for some of his poems and that's billions of dollars right there. 103 00:10:20.320 --> 00:10:25.640 And so Wordsworth was frustrated that he wasn't doing as well in the marketplace as other 104 00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:30.680 of Poets, but he had this sense that he was truly great and they weren't, and that over 105 00:10:30.680 --> 00:10:35.960 time their popularity would fade and he would become more and more popular. And indeed by 106 00:10:35.960 --> 00:10:45.500 the 1830s he reports his income off his copyrights was about £1,500, which is again a lot of 107 00:10:45.500 --> 00:10:53.240 money in those days. By the way, he was one of the first authors to hold on to his copyrights. 108 00:10:53.240 --> 00:10:59.360 Most of us academics have given away our copyrights to the presses that publish our books and 109 00:10:59.360 --> 00:11:04.460 it was very characteristic in those days for almost everybody to get whatever money they 110 00:11:04.460 --> 00:11:08.740 could from the publisher initially and let the publisher bear the risk. 111 00:11:08.740 --> 00:11:16.460 But Wordsworth did hold on to his copyrights and he therefore wanted them extended and extended 112 00:11:16.460 --> 00:11:23.420 And his argument was that a great poet, an original genius, creates the taste by which 113 00:11:23.420 --> 00:11:24.900 he is appreciated. 114 00:11:24.900 --> 00:11:30.120 That's why Wordsworth wrote so many prefaces to his works, trying to explain to a non-buying 115 00:11:30.120 --> 00:11:33.260 public how really great his poetry was. 116 00:11:33.260 --> 00:11:38.640 And again, it's interesting that Talford uses that very language in the parliamentary debate. 117 00:11:38.640 --> 00:11:46.120 So I'm going to read you a couple of things that Wordsworth said about, in defense of 118 00:11:46.120 --> 00:11:49.640 extending the copyright. 119 00:11:49.640 --> 00:11:54.280 The objections against Telford's proposed bill rest upon the presumption that it would 120 00:11:54.280 --> 00:11:59.920 check the circulation of literature and by so doing would prove injurious to the public. 121 00:11:59.920 --> 00:12:08.080 And indeed, the people who republished books, a famous one named Teg, were arguing that 122 00:12:08.080 --> 00:12:14.640 Copyrights long enough, by extending it you'll keep the circulation of books down. We're 123 00:12:14.640 --> 00:12:20.560 the ones who do cheap reprints and make books available to people. So Wordsworth recognizes 124 00:12:20.560 --> 00:12:26.400 that objection. But this is what I love. This is so characteristic of the romantic poets. 125 00:12:26.400 --> 00:12:30.760 But what we want in these times, and are likely to want still more, is not the circulation 126 00:12:30.760 --> 00:12:37.600 of books, but of good books. And above all the production of works, the authors of which 127 00:12:37.600 --> 00:12:42.360 which look beyond the passing day and are desirous of pleasing and instructing future 128 00:12:42.360 --> 00:12:46.080 generations. Now there cannot be a question that the proposed 129 00:12:46.080 --> 00:12:52.180 bill would greatly strengthen such desire. A conscientious author who had a family to 130 00:12:52.180 --> 00:12:58.160 maintain and a prospect of descendants would regard the additional labor bestowed upon 131 00:12:58.160 --> 00:13:04.560 any considerable work he might have at hand in the light of an insurance of money. Copyright 132 00:13:04.560 --> 00:13:08.000 is insurance, kind of life insurance for authors, 133 00:13:08.000 --> 00:13:10.600 upon his own life for the benefit of his issue, 134 00:13:10.600 --> 00:13:13.000 and he would be animated in his efforts accordingly, 135 00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:15.600 and would cheerfully undergo present privations 136 00:13:15.600 --> 00:13:17.960 for such future recompense. 137 00:13:17.960 --> 00:13:20.840 Deny it to him, and you unfeelingly leave 138 00:13:20.840 --> 00:13:24.080 a weight upon his spirits, which must deaden his exertions, 139 00:13:24.080 --> 00:13:26.600 or you force him to turn his faculties, 140 00:13:26.600 --> 00:13:29.280 unless he is unjust to those whom both nature and law require 141 00:13:29.280 --> 00:13:32.720 that he should provide for, to inferior employments. 142 00:13:32.720 --> 00:13:39.440 So basically it's an argument that we need copyright because otherwise people, writers 143 00:13:39.440 --> 00:13:43.440 will devote themselves to the mere fans and fashions of the moment in an effort to make 144 00:13:43.440 --> 00:13:48.140 a quick buck, but to write a great work of literature you need to be able to take the 145 00:13:48.140 --> 00:13:53.840 longer perspective and only the assurance he said a perpetual copyright would permit 146 00:13:53.840 --> 00:13:54.840 that. 147 00:13:54.840 --> 00:14:00.920 Might add there you notice he's obsessed as we saw on that second sonnet with his family. 148 00:14:00.920 --> 00:14:07.360 He really wanted a form of property. He complains poets don't own land, but they could have 149 00:14:07.360 --> 00:14:15.360 these perpetual copyrights that would be like a land to give to their descendants. Here's 150 00:14:15.360 --> 00:14:22.560 another example of what he said on behalf. This actually was years before the actual 151 00:14:22.560 --> 00:14:28.600 parliamentary debate. It's in 1808. He was saying, I'm told it is proposed to expand 152 00:14:28.600 --> 00:14:33.200 and the right from fourteen years as it now stands after the decease of authors till twenty-eight. 153 00:14:33.200 --> 00:14:38.360 This I think far too short a period. At least I'm sure there requires much more than that 154 00:14:38.360 --> 00:14:43.040 length of time to establish the reputation of original productions, both in philosophy 155 00:14:43.040 --> 00:14:47.680 and poetry, and to bring them consequently into such circulation that the authors and 156 00:14:47.680 --> 00:14:52.880 the persons of their heirs of prosperity, there it is again, can in any degree be benefited, 157 00:14:52.880 --> 00:14:57.720 I mean in a pecuniary point of view, for the trouble they must have taken to produce the 158 00:14:57.720 --> 00:15:03.840 Works. The law as it now stands merely consults the interest of the useful drudges in literature 159 00:15:03.840 --> 00:15:08.640 or flimsy and shallow writers whose works are upon a level with the taste and knowledge 160 00:15:08.640 --> 00:15:14.540 of the age, while men of real power, like Wordsworth, who go before their age are deprived 161 00:15:14.540 --> 00:15:20.460 of all hope of their families being benefited for their exertions. 162 00:15:20.460 --> 00:15:29.660 So notice the theory here that poets need incentives to produce great work, that if they don't 163 00:15:29.660 --> 00:15:35.020 have a perpetual copyright, they're just not going to put into poetry what they need to 164 00:15:35.020 --> 00:15:39.940 produce great works. Now this is the same Wordsworth who in the 1800 preface to the 165 00:15:39.940 --> 00:15:47.060 Lyrical Ballads defines poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. That's his 166 00:15:47.060 --> 00:15:52.900 It's a romantic theory of poetry that's spontaneous, it just flows out of you, it's overwhelming. 167 00:15:52.900 --> 00:16:00.140 That is probably closer to the way he produces poetry than anything he says in these letters. 168 00:16:00.140 --> 00:16:06.700 It in a way is such a mechanical view of poetry that the poet sits down and calculates, now 169 00:16:06.700 --> 00:16:11.380 should I write something suited to the moment and make a lot of money to give my family, 170 00:16:11.380 --> 00:16:18.540 or should I wait and do be a genius and if I have copyright then I can afford to wait 171 00:16:18.540 --> 00:16:26.400 for my poetry to become famous. That's a very unromantic view of how poetry is produced. 172 00:16:26.400 --> 00:16:31.720 For a more romantic view of how poetry is produced, I turn to a man named Ludwig von 173 00:16:31.720 --> 00:16:37.740 Mises and a book called Human Action, which has some interesting discussion of copyright 174 00:16:37.740 --> 00:16:43.900 in it, but particularly a section called The Creative Genius, in which Mises writes, 175 00:16:43.900 --> 00:16:49.580 Far above the millions that come and pass away tower the pioneers, the men whose deeds 176 00:16:49.580 --> 00:16:55.380 and ideas cut out new paths for mankind. For the pioneering genius to create is the essence 177 00:16:55.380 --> 00:17:01.060 of life. To live means for him to create. He goes on to say the activities of these 178 00:17:01.060 --> 00:17:06.820 prodigious men cannot be fully subsumed under the praxeological concept of labor. It's 179 00:17:06.820 --> 00:17:17.820 This is really quite remarkable. People who think of Mises as viewing everything in economic terms don't realize that he was able to see that there's something that goes beyond that. 180 00:17:17.820 --> 00:17:21.820 And I just want to read one more sentence from him, a saying about poems. 181 00:17:21.820 --> 00:17:29.820 They are not the outcome of the employment of labor, which could have been devoted to the production of other amenities for the production of a masterpiece or philosophy or literature. 182 00:17:29.820 --> 00:17:34.820 Poetry for Mises is indeed the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. 183 00:17:34.820 --> 00:17:40.540 by saying that in this debate, Ludwig von Mises is the romantic and William Wordsworth 184 00:17:40.540 --> 00:17:47.360 is the narrow-minded economic thinker who talks about incentivizing and the poetic indifference 185 00:17:47.360 --> 00:17:48.360 curve.