James Joyce copyright
p2p news / p2pnet: Yesterday, in our story on the copyright dispute in which the Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project is suing the James Joyce estate for refusing to allow Carol Shloss to use copyrighted Joycean material on her web site, we inadvertently attributed a comment post on professor Lawrence Lessig’s blog to Dr Matthew Rimmer.
The comment, "I’ve been studying Finnegans Wake with a reading group in Berkeley for nearly a decade now, and have met Carol Shloss and many other hardcore Joyceans who have long lamented Stephen James Joyce’s actions," was in fact made by an anonymous poster.
However, Rimmer is among other things a senior lecturer and the director of higher degree research at the ANU College of Law in Canberra, Australia. Last year, he wrote Bloomsday: Copyright Estates and Cultural Festivals over some of the litigation involving the Joyce estate and is tomorrow (Friday) giving a paper on the topic in Canberra, and previewing the new fair use law suit.
He’s currently working on a paper on digital copyright and the consumer revolution and has written on copyright term extension, fair use and time-shifting, iPods and TiVo, search engines like Google, peer to peer networks such as Napster and Kazaa, moral rights, and traditional knowledge.
In the conclusion to Bloomsday, Rimmer says:
The Joyce Estate has brought an array of legal actions to control the publication and communication of the works of James Joyce. Such litigation has had a chilling effect upon literary scholarship, anthologies, music compositions, public performances, and cultural exhibitions. As Robert Spoo observes:
Extremely long copyrights have given artificial voice and weight to the personal predilections of one who, in the absence of such rights, would be an ordinary participant in the life of art and letters like most of the rest of us. These protracted monopolies create, or permit, peculiar and unaccustomed distortions of the public sphere; they encourage attempts to re-privatize that space, to reclaim it in the interests of family privacy or personal taste. They allow a mere right-holder to become a privileged and arbitrary custodian of culture. And all of this would be exactly as it should be were these monopolies confined to one generation or two. But to see this capricious veto power being exercised at a period so startlingly remote from the cultural and historical origins of the work in question is dispiriting.
The case of the Joyce Estate is not an isolated one. There have been a spate of similar incidents involving the custodians of the work of JD Salinger, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, to name a few. The trend towards copyright term extension has invested copyright estates with a great deal of power. There will be increasing conflict with scholars, biographers, artists, and performers who wish to use such copyright work before the expiry of the life of the author plus seventy years.
There is a need to revise and design copyright law in order to protect the interests of libraries, archives, galleries, and cultural institutions. As Brendan Howlin observed in the Irish Parliament:
Libraries are an extraordinary community resource. There has been an extraordinary development in the State-wide library network in the past five to ten years. Libraries are not just repositories of books which people take out and return within a week or a fortnight. For many communities, libraries are now a historical, cultural and artistic hub. We need to acknowledge that in a way we have not done up to now and allow libraries to develop to their full potential.
There should be stronger mechanisms to guarantee access to copyright works – such as a wide range of exceptions for fair dealing, or better still an open-ended defence of fair use, extensive exemptions for libraries and cultural institutions, and a flexible compulsory licensing scheme. Such revisions would promote the original purpose of copyright law to promote the wider public interest in education, research, and learning.
The ad hoc reforms of the Irish Parliament do not go far enough. The extension of the copyright term should be wound back in Europe and elsewhere, because of its impoverishment of the public domain. There is no need for the relatives of authors to enjoy such extensive post-mortem rights. The work of James Joyce should be allowed to fall into the public domain. As Robert Spoo comments:
When Ulysses finally enters the public domain worldwide, we will witness, just as we did some years ago when copyrights in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man expired in the United States, an explosion of cheap reprints and new editions of Joyce’s Irish epic. We will also see uninhibited use of the work in streamed Internet performances, public readings, dramatic and cinematic adaptations, and multimedia digital presentations complete with period photographs, Dublin maps, sound clips of Irish songs, and hyperlinks to critical interpretations and manuscript sources. On that red-letter day for the public domain, Ulysses will finally take its place with The Odyssey as raw myth-making material for some future national epic. Indeed, it can be argued that a work does not really become a “classic” until it is unqualifiedly available for cultural exploitation. It would follow that overlong copyright protection is an inhibition on the full organic development of a classic.
The time has come for the work of James Joyce to be emancipated from the private possession of his estate, and become part of the intellectual commons, free to be interpreted, adapted, and performed by scholars and artists alike.
Also See:
James Joyce estate – James Joyce web use wrangle, June 14, 2006
==================
p2pnet newsfeeds for your site.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss
Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
June 16th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
I guess y’all missed it twice. Nothing at all anonymous about the blog comment you reference. Click the name of the poster and you’ll find out exactly who he is.