Updates: Mark Helprin, Scribd lawsuit
We have probably already given perpetual-copyright zealot Mark Helprin more coverage than he deserves, but this TechDirt article from Michael Masnick is too good to pass up.
It seems that Helprin’s book, Digital Barbarism, has been getting nearly universally panned by reviewers. But according to an op-ed by Helprin in the National Review, the reason for that is not that the book might be bad—it is because publishers assigned the very people Helprin slammed in the book to review it.
If nothing else, Helprin does not suffer from an inadequate ego. In the op-ed, he paints himself as some kind of lone holy warrior, defending the sacred trust of copyright against some vast Internet conspiracy theory:
Because corporate defenders of intellectual property think they need only protect established law, they sit inertially in their towers and forfeit the more general debate to their active and numerous opponents. Thus, unwittingly engaged and with neither allies nor organizational support of any kind, I thought the only way to respond to hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of critics mobilized by “public interest” groups richly funded by private interests such as Google, was to write a book.
Right, Mark. Just keep thinking that.
Strangely, Helprin insists he is actually not in favor of perpetual copyright. “And because it seems necessary to their physiology to think that I am for perpetual copyright — as an originalist, I can’t be, and anyway never have been — they continue to insist that I am.”
Well, whatever, Mark. I’ll confess that I haven’t read the book myself—I had a hard enough time wading through the florid prose in Helprin’s op-ed—but the excerpts other people quoted sure made it seem that way. I suppose that if you can’t defend your position any other way, you have to move the goalposts.
And as Masnick points out, Helprin does not actually address any of the criticism he received.
Again, he fails to respond to a single point raised by any of the reviews. Instead, he just whines that people thought he was clueless, but he insists he’s not. How could he be clueless? He quoted famous people!
For all that Helprin dislikes and distrusts the Internet, feeling that it sucks the intelligence and will out of anyone who uses it, he sure is doing a great impression of a forum troll.
The Scribd Lawsuit: Catch 22, Anyone?
Masnick also has an update on the Scribd lawsuit that I mentioned the other day. It seems that one of the claims the lawyers are making is that Scribd’s anti-infringement filter—the thing that prevents copyrighted material from being uploaded again after it has been noticed and taken down—itself violates copyright, because it has to store a copy of the copyrighted material so it can recognize the material if someone tries to upload it again.
One wonders if Joseph Heller is one of those people whose works have been uploaded illegally.
As Masnick puts it, “it’s quite a bizarre lawsuit that not only sues Scribd for failing to block an uploaded book, but at the very same time also sues the company—under the same law—for trying to block an uploaded book.” Fair use precedent seems to be on Scribd’s side in this matter.
It looks as if the lawyers have an issue with Scribd having the temerity to exist at all, and they would like to put an end to it.
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:44 am
I think Mr. Helprin is something of a lawyer about his originalist position. He would have no problem with copyrights that extended 2000 years, but since that is a limited time, then it clearly falls within the intentions of the founders — this despite the fact that I suspect that Madison, Hamilton and the other framers of the Constitution would have been horrified by the notion of copyrights lasting so long. Of course, most of us realize that whether one claims to be an originalist or a believer in a living Constitution, one generally finds a way to twist that framework into the position one takes.
It seems to me, that Mr. Helprin has become so sure of his own intellectual superiority that he has fallen into the trap of believing that using his over-extended vocabulary is all that it should take to sway the more intelligent amongst his readers to his position. As for the rest? Well apparently their opinions have been irredeemably corrupted by various types of digital media around us. Mr. Helprin attempts to channel the late William F. Buckley but he fails to remember that Mr. Buckley, though in love of big words himself, never used them with the obvious, though denied malice of Mr. Helprin and always in the service of a rigorously argued position.
One last thought, he seems to believe that those who are against extending copyright right are somehow against the rights of the individual. He seems to forget that every right of one individual constrains the rights of other individuals. Over extended copyright not only serves no purpose other than to continue to enrich those who had nothing to do with the work copyrighted, but it also limits the ability of individuals to make use of that work in wonderful ways.
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Bill
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:18 pm
A little more forethought might have helped avoid the Scribd lawsuit. I suggested that the author could have started by asking three questions http://bit.ly/2t007l