But Courtney, someone somewhere is saying, you are an author.  You make money on intellectual property.  Don’t you favor strong intellectual property regimes?  Don’t you know that intellectual property is in crisis?

Yeah, piracy sucks.  And like I said, pirates are assholes.  But . . . if I live the average life expectancy, I will get eleventy-one more years of copyright protection for my book.  So heftier protections–a larger scope of copyright protection, or a longer term of copyright–is not really going to help with the main problem.  Pirates exist because people are assholes.  If people are assholes, in violation of the law, it’s hard to come up with a law that stops them from being assholes.  Not unless you want to go way draconian, and writing books and publishing should be fun, not a second invention of the Spanish inquisition.

We don’t need stronger copyright laws.  We need stronger social norms against being an asshole–and that means that you can’t go grabbing everything you can get.

Let’s go back to my playground analogy.  People are more likely to respect your claim to have a soccer ball at recess if your claim is reasonable: say, for ten minutes, or for half of recess, or maybe if you are playing with a large group, for all of recess.  But if you say, “Anyone who gets the soccer ball gets it for a month,” the social norm of respecting the first possessor of the ball as the putative owner for some duration is going to fade real fast.

If you don’t want people to be assholes, you shouldn’t be an asshole yourself.  And I think that pushing for more and more copyright protection–long past the point of commercial value for 99% of the copyrights out there–is a purely asshole move.  Don’t want people to be assholes?  Don’t be an asshole yourself.

I think maybe one of the reasons I don’t see eye-to-eye with other people about copyright is that I don’t see copyright as protecting something that is morally mine.  Yes, I wrote my book.  Yes, I sweated blood over it.  But I wouldn’t have been able to write the book I did if I hadn’t read so voraciously, and the books I read shaped me.  It’s kind of a gestalt peer-review process of fiction: the writer I am stands on the shoulders of the writers I have read.

And so I see copyright as a way to help authors make enough money so that they can write a little bit more (or, um, promote her book so that anyone reads it at all).  It’s not a moral thing; it’s a manners thing.  (Not plagiarism, though–plagiarism and copyright infringement are distinct, and plagiarism is morally abhorrent.)

I’m not sure this makes any sense, but I see copyright as kind of my bargain with society:  You guys recognize that I did something cool, and when I’m done with my toys over here, I’ll pack them up in a nice box and let everyone else play with them.  That’s it.  Copyright infringement, in my mind, is like taking a soccer ball from someone else on the playground–if someone else took possession of the ball first, they should get to use it first that recess.  Taking the ball away from someone who claimed it first is a complete asshole move–but it’s not the same thing as stealing.  It’s just being an asshole.

Copyright, like a soccer ball at recess, has a time limit.

I recognize that this is a minority view.

So, here’s a moral dilemma.  I mean, it’s not a dilemma.  It is more like a little bit of moral tension.

I have some very strong views on copyright.  Or, to put it differently:  I have very strong views on the strength of copyright.  I think, among other things, that the term of copyright granted in our society is way too long.  I think, among other things, that fan fiction should be unambiguously allowed.  If I had my way, I’d set the term of copyright to the term of patents, or at most twice that:  twenty to forty years, max.  Possibly twenty years with an additional twenty year automatic extension, which must be applied for with a tiny (say $10) processing fee.

That is never, ever going to happen, so I think that the second-best thing is to contract around onerous copyright rules, e.g., through a Creative Commons license.

But I did just happen to sign a contract that gives HQN the rights to my copyright so long as my book remains in print, for the natural length of copyright.  I feel . . . very ambiguous about this.  I feel that it would be wrong–really wrong, and because I feel so strongly about copyright length, for me, downright morally hazardous–if one of my descendants were still making royalties off my book in a century.  And however much I still want my book to be on sale then (I know, dream on), it bothers me.

Ultimately, I had no problem signing the contract simply because I don’t think my book will be in print in 100 years, and my rights will revert to me, and I’ll probably release it into the public domain long before then, either by bequest or during my life–because once my book has lived out its time of commercial viability, I feel I have an obligation to release it into the public domain, even if technically the copyright has many decades to go.

What do you think of all this?  If you’re an author, do you feel like you have any interest at all in what happens to your books 100 years from now?  Does it bother you to think you can hold on to a piece of culture for a full century?