No Country for Old Media
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No Country for Old Media Chris Hubbles A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2018 Reading Committee: Jin Ha Lee, Chair Adam D. Moore Nicholas M. Weber Program Authorized to Offer Degree: The Information School Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY-4.0) 2018 Chris Hubbles University of Washington Abstract No Country for Old Media Chris Hubbles Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Jin Ha Lee, Associate Professor The Information School The philosophical defense of intellectual property theory has become a significant, and growing, area of inquiry over the past several decades. Copyright, the legal mechanism protecting creative works, is one major class of intellectual property rights. Modern intellectual property thought draws primarily from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paradigms, which relied upon reasonable but implicit assumptions about durability of material substrates. Subsequent changes in how intellectual works are fixed physically, as well as practical experience with copyright implementation, challenge these assumptions about durability, and indicate the need for more circumscribed grants of intellectual rights. Yet copyright duration and scope increased substantially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the changes in media durability have gone largely unconsidered by recent theorists. As a result, modern adaptations of intellectual property theory extrapolated from Enlightenment-era models fail to afford sufficient value to preservation of creative works. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century media are inherently fragile or unstable, illustrating problems with the archetype of the long-term information carrier – for instance, newspaper and paperback books in print, daguerreotypes in photography, phonograph cylinders and shellac discs in audio, nitrate film and VHS tapes in visual media, and floppy disks in software-based media. The relationship over time between American copyright policy and preservation efforts is assessed for three multimedia formats: sound recordings, moving images, and video games. This set of historical analyses is employed to suggest revisions to modern intellectual property theories, offering a more robust conceptualization of what intellectual property is for and what it should accomplish in practice. Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 I. Definitions............................................................................................................................... 5 A. Preservation ..................................................................................................................... 5 B. Intellectual Property ...................................................................................................... 10 II. Sound Recording Copyright (part 1) ............................................................................. 20 III. Sound Recording Copyright (part 2) ............................................................................. 37 A. Duration: “The Artifice of Eternity” ............................................................................. 38 B. Scope: “Sick with Desire” ............................................................................................. 52 C. Ephemerality: “Fastened to a Dying Animal” .............................................................. 63 D. Preservation: “Such a Form as Grecian Goldsmiths Make” ........................................ 67 IV. Copyright and Preservation ............................................................................................ 81 A. Utilitarianism ................................................................................................................. 86 B. Lockean Theories ........................................................................................................... 88 C. Personality Theory ......................................................................................................... 97 D. Applications beyond Copyright .................................................................................... 101 V. Moving Image Copyright .............................................................................................. 104 A. Duration ....................................................................................................................... 106 B. Scope ............................................................................................................................ 111 C. Ephemerality ................................................................................................................ 117 D. Preservation ................................................................................................................. 119 VI. Video Game Copyright .................................................................................................. 127 A. Duration ....................................................................................................................... 129 B. Scope ............................................................................................................................ 130 C. Ephemerality ................................................................................................................ 135 D. Preservation ................................................................................................................. 140 VII. Building Preservation into Copyright Law ................................................................. 152 A. Duration Reduction ...................................................................................................... 155 B. Scope Reduction ........................................................................................................... 158 C. Compulsory Licensing .................................................................................................. 169 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 177 Acknowledgments The following people made material contributions to bringing this document to fruition: Susie Cummings, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz, Kenneth Einar Himma, Stephen Keating, Richard B. Kielbowicz, Jin Ha Lee, David W. McDonald, Amanda Menking, Adam D. Moore, Bryce Clayton Newell, Sean M. O’Connor, Joseph T. Tennis, John Vallier, Nicholas M. Weber, and the attendees of the Works-in-Progress Intellectual Property Conference, 2015. Introduction That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees – Those dying generations – at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.1 So begins Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, written as he entered his sixties and countenanced the inevitability of his mortality. In Yeats’s conception, life has become inhospitable to the aged, in a land fervently championing the youthful, the vibrant, and the new. His body breaks down and fails him – “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick,” he continues – and with the attentions of youth fixed upon what burgeons and blossoms, he cannot, through them, acquire renewed vitality. More with patient, almost nostalgic resignation than with bitterness, he concludes that, if he is to ward off the withering onset of senescence, he must leave the world of the spry and jubilant, and travel to Byzantium, idealized as a capital of timeless erudition and wisdom. There, he can discard his decrepit corporeal form, and pass on his lifetime of understanding to those most willing and able to absorb it and shepherd it for the future. Yeats’s poem is, in some sense, a parable, a plea to reconsider the value and contributions of old age against the saturation of culture with the concerns of the young. I want to suggest that the poem’s parable also illuminates when reflected upon the status of modern copyright, both in theory and practice. I posit that copyright, in its theoretical oversights and in the effects of its practical implementation, has enabled a wide-ranging neglect of old and infirm creative works. The moral and legal rules for generation, duplication, and transfer of ideas and their expressions, collectively known as intellectual property, play major roles in shaping and governing the movement of information in modern society. A colossal body of scholarship has grown up around intellectual property as a concept, seeking to explain, justify, and critique its historical trajectory, theoretical underpinnings, and practical effects. Yet preservation, a concept (and practice) central to the continued survival and integrity of cultural works, has had little impact on intellectual property thinking, and thus, on conceptions of the proper functioning of copyright laws in the modern world. The purpose of this dissertation will be to demonstrate, using historical and legal analyses and philosophical investigation, that, far from being a minimal oversight, the failure to address preservation concerns by intellectual property philosophers constitutes a trenchant challenge to 1 William Butler Yeats, The Tower. Macmillan, 1928, pp. 1-3. 1 existing intellectual