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Title: Copywrongs
Author: Samuel Edward Konkin III
Date: July 1, 1986
Language: en
Topics: intellectual property
Source: https://www.sek3.net/copywrongs.html
Notes: The Voluntaryist  Editor: Carl Watner  July 1986 / Whole # 20  Pages 4-5

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Copywrongs

Having done every step of production in the publishing industry, both

for myself and others, I have one irrefutable empirical conclusion about

the economic effect of copyrights on prices and wages: nada. Zero.

Nihil. So negligible you’d need a geiger counter to measure it.

Before I move on to exactly what copyrights do have an impact on, one

may be interested as to why the praxeological negligibility of this

tariff. The answer is found in the peculiar nature of publishing. There

are big publishers and small publishers and very, very few in between.

For the Big Boys, royalties are a fraction of one percent of

multi-million press runs. They lose more money from bureaucratic

interstices and round-off error. The small publishers are largely

counter-economic and usually survive on donated material or break-in

writing; let the new writers worry about copyrighting and reselling.

Furthermore, there are a very few cases of legal action in the magazine

world because of this disparity. The little ’zines have no hope beating

a rip-off and shrug it off after a perfunctory threat; the Biggies

rattle their corporate-lawyer sabres and nearly anyone above ground

quietly bows.

Book publishing is a small part of total publishing and there are some

middle-range publishers who do worry about the total cost picture in

marginal publishing cases. But now there are two kinds of writers: Big

Names and everyone else. Everyone Else is seldom reprinted; copyrights

have nothing to do with first printings (economically). Big Names rake

it in—but they also make a lot from ever-higher bids for their next

contract. And the lowered risk of not selling out a reprint of a Big

Name who has already sold out a print run more than compensates paying

the writing the extra fee.

So Big Names writers would lose something substantial if the copyright

privilege ceased enforcement. But Big Name writers are an even smaller

percentage of writers than Big Name Actors are of actors. If they all

vanished tomorrow, no one would notice (except their friends, one

hopes). Still, one may reasonably wonder if the star system’s incentive

can be done away with without the whole pyramid collapsing. If any

economic argument remains for copyrights, it’s incentive.

Crap. As Don Marquis put in the words of Archy the Cockroach, “Creative

expression is the need of my soul.” And Archy banged his head on

typewriter key after typewriter key all night long to turn out his

columns—which Marquis cashed in. Writing as a medium of expression will

continue as long as someone has a burning need to express. And if all

they have to express is a need for second payments and associated

residuals, we’re all better off for not reading it.

But, alas, the instant elimination of copyrights would have negligible

effect on the star system. While it would cut into the lifelong gravy

train of stellar scribes, it would have no effect, on their biggest

source of income: the contract for their next book (or script, play or

even magazine article or short story). That is where the money is.

“You’re only as good as your last piece”—but you collect for that on

your next sale. Market decisions are made on anticipated sales. Sounds

like straight von Mises, right? (Another great writer who profited

little from copyrighting—but others are currently raking it in from

Ludwig’s privileged corpse—er, corpus.)

The point of all this vulgar praxeology is not just to clear the way for

the moral question. The market (praise be) is telling us something.

After all, both market human action and morality arise from the same

Natural Law.

In fact, let us clear out some more deadwood and red herrings before we

face the Great Moral Issue. First, if you abolish copyrights, would

great authors starve? Nope, in fact, the market might open a trifle for

new blood.

Would writers write if they did not get paid? Who says they wouldn’t?

There is no link between payment for writing and copyrights. Royalties

roll in (or, much more often, trickle in) long after the next work is

sold and the one after is in progress.

Is not a producer entitled to the fruit of his labour? Sure, that’s why

writers are paid. But if I make a copy of a shoe or a table or a

fireplace log (with my little copied axe), does the cobbler or

wood-worker or woodchopper collect a royalty?

A. J. Galambos, bless his anarchoheart, attempted to take copyrights and

patents to their logical conclusion. Every time we break a stick, Ug The

First should collect a royalty. Ideas are property, he says; madness and

chaos result.

Property is a concept extracted from nature by conceptual man to

designate the distribution of scarce goods—the entire material

world—among avaricious, competing egos. If I have an idea, you may have

the same idea and it takes nothing from me. Use yours as you will and I

do the same.

Ideas, to use the ‘au courant’ language of computer programmers, are the

programmes; property is the data. Or, to use another current cliche,

ideas are the maps and cartography, and property is the territory. The

difference compares well to the differences between sex and talking

about sex.

Would not ideas be repressed without the incentive (provided by

copyrights)? ‘Au contraire’ the biggest problem with ideas is the

delivery system. How do we get them to those marketeers who can

distribute them?

My ideas are pieces of what passes for my soul (or, if you prefer, ego).

Therefore, everytime someone adopts one of them, a little piece of me

has infected them. And for this I get paid, too! On top of all that, I

should be paid and paid and paid as they get staler and staler?

If copyrights are such a drag, why and how did they evolve? Not by the

market process. Like all privileges, they were grants of the king. The

idea did not—could not—arise until Gutenberg’s printing press and it

coincided with the rise of royal divinity, and soon after, the onslaught

of mercantilism.

So who benefits from this privilege? There is an economic impact I

failed to mention earlier. It is, in Bastiat’s phrasing, the unseen.

artists, of restraint of trade. Yes, we’re talking monopoly.

For when the Corporation tosses its bone to the struggling writer, and

an occasional steak to the pampered tenth of a percent, it receives an

enforceable legal monopoly on the editing, typesetting, printing,

packaging, marketing (including advertising) and sometimes even local

distribution of that book or magazine. (In magazines, it also has an

exclusivity in layout vs other articles and illustrations and published

advertisements.) How’s that for vertical integration and restraint of

trade?

And so the system perpetuates, give or take a few counter-economic

outlaws and some enterprising Taiwanese with good smuggling connections.

Because copyrights permeate all mass media, Copyright is the Rip-off

That Dare Not Mention Its Name. The rot corrupting our entire

communications market is so entrenched it will survive nothing short of

abolition of the State and its enforcement of Copyright. Because the

losers, small-name writers and all readers, lose so little each, we are

content—it seems—to be nickel-and-dime plundered. Why worry about

mosquito bites when we have the vampire gouges of income taxes and

automobile tariffs?

Now for the central moral question: what first woke me up to the problem

that was the innocent viewer scenario. Consider the following careful

contractual construction.

Author Big and Publisher Bigger have contracts not to reveal a word of

what’s in some publication. Everyone on the staff, every person in the

step of production is contracted not to reveal a word. All the

distributors are covered and the advertising quotes only a minimal

amount of words. Every reader is, like Death Records in Phantom of the

Paradise, under contract, too; that is, every reader who purchases the

book or ’zine and thus interacts with someone who is under

contract—interacts in a voluntary trade and voluntary agreement.

No, I am not worried about the simultaneous creator; although an obvious

victim, he or she is rare, given sufficient complexity in the work under

questions. (However, some recent copyright decisions and the fact that

the Dolly Parton case even got as far as a serious trial—means the

corruption is spreading.)

One day you and I walk into a room—invited but without even mention of a

contract—and the publication lies open on a table. Photons leap from the

pages to our eyes and our hapless brain processes the information.

Utterly innocent, having committed no volitional act, we are copyright

violators. We have unintentionally embarked on a life of privacy.

And God or the Market help us if we now try to act on the ideas now in

our mind or to reveal this unintended guilty secret in any way. The

State shall strike us—save only if Author Big and Publisher Bigger

decide in their tyrannous mercy that we are too small and not worth the

trouble.

For if we use the ideas or repeat or reprint them, even as part of our

own larger creation—bang! There goes the monopoly. And so each and every

innocent viewer must be suppressed.

By the Market? Hardly. The entire contractual agreement falls like a

house of cards when the innocent gets his or her forbidden view. No,

fruits of labour or any other element of the moral, free market.

It is a creature of the State, the Vampire’s little bat. And, as far as

I’m concerned, the word should be copywrong.