Dear Fellow members, Distinguished guests,

Good morning.

How many of you love How many of you love paintings? How many of you love movies? How many of you love books?

These things have one common character - they are works copyrightable.

Today, I am going to talk with you about copyright, its past, its present and its future. I will also leave a few minutes for questions and answers, so please take note of your questions.

In the Past, we had no Copyright

Long long time ago, in the ancient world, there wasn’t the sharp distinction between authorship and copying that there tends to be today. There was a spectrum between writing an original work, and copying. Someone wrote a book, other copied that book, and some other ones might copy part of the book and wrote their own part as well. There were many books that were partly copied, but mixed with original writing.

I don’t believe there was any idea of copyright in the ancient world and it would have been rather difficult to enforce one, because books could be copied by anyone who could read anywhere, anyone who could get some writing materials, and a brush or a feather to write with. So, that was a rather clear simple situation - copying books and writing books took similar effort. Every reader could copy the book she read anywhere she liked.

This was no concept of copyright back then. Do you agree?

Copyright came with printing technology

Later on, printing was developed and printing changed the situation greatly. It provided a much more efficient way to make copies of books, provided that they were all identical. And it required specialised, fairly expensive equipment that an ordinary reader would not have. So in effect it created a situation in which copies could only feasibly be made by specialised businesses, of which the number was not that large. There might have been hundreds of printing presses in a country and hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions of actually people who could read. So the decrease in the number of places in which copies could be made was tremendous.

Now the idea of copyright developed along with the printing press. This would have been in China where printing was first invented during Song dynasty, but I could not find a reference. The system of copyright fitted in naturally with the printing press because it became rare for ordinary readers to make copies. It still happen. People who were very poor or very rich had handmade copies of books. The very rich people did this to show off their wealth: they had beautiful illuminated wealth to show that they could afford this. And poor people still sometimes copied books by hand because they couldn’t afford printed copies. As the song goes “Time ain’t money when all you got is time.” So some poor people copied books with a pen. But for the most part the books were all made on printing presses by publishers and copyright as a system fitted in very well with the technical system. For one thing it was painless for readers, because the readers weren’t going to make copies anyway. And the system was fairly easy to enforce again because there were only a small number of places where it had to be enforced: only the printing presses, and because of this it didn’t require, it didn’t involve, a struggle against the public. There was very little need trying to copy books manually, and there is no meaning to be threatened with arrest for doing it.

And in fact, in addition to not restricting the reader’s directly, it didn’t cause much of a problem for readers, because it might have added a small fraction to the price of books but it didn’t double the price, so that small extra addition to the price was a very small burden for the readers. The actions restricted by copyright were actions that you couldn’t do, as an ordinary reader, and therefore, it didn’t cause a problem. And because of this there was no need for harsh punishments to convince readers to tolerate it and to obey.

So copyright effectively was an industrial regulation. It restricted publishers and writers but it didn’t restrict the general public. Do you agree?

As time went on, printing got more efficient. Eventually even poor people didn’t have to bother copying books by hand and the idea sort of got forgotten. It’s about in the 1800s that essentially printing got cheap enough so that essentially everyone could afford printed books, so to some extent the idea of poor people copying books by hand was lost from memory.

You didn’t know of this, right?

Originally in England copyright was partly intended as a measure of censorship. People who wanted to publish books were required to get approval from the government. This was similar record in Song dynasty but the idea began to change and it a different idea was expressed explicitly in the US constitution. When the US constitution was written there was a proposal that authors should be entitled to a monopoly on copying their books. This idea was rejected. Instead, a different idea of the philosophy of copyright was put into the constitution. The idea is that people have the natural right to copy things but copyright as an artificial restriction on copying can be authorised for the sake of promoting progress.

The system of copyright would have been the same more or less either way, but this was a statement about the purpose which is said to justify copyright. It is explicitly justified as a means to promote progress, not as an entitlement for copyright owners. So the system is meant to modify the behaviour of copyright owners so as to benefit the public. The benefit consists of more books being written and published and this is intended to contribute to the progress of civilisation, to spreading ideas, and as a means to this end. In other words as a means to this end copyright exists. So this also thought of as a bargain between the public and authors; that the public gives up its natural right to make copies of anything in exchange for the progress that is brought about indirectly, by encouraging more people to write.

Dear audience, when you hear the word “pirate” what do you feel? Pirates attack boats with weapons, but sharing copied books is spreading ideas, is contributing to the progress of civilization.

Anyway, as long as the age of the printing press continued, copyright was painless, easy to enforce, and probably a good idea. But the age of the printing press began changing a few decades ago when things like Xerox machines and tape recorders started to be available, and more recently as computer networks have come into use the situation has changed drastically. We are now in a situation technologically more like the ancient world, where anybody who could read something could also make a copy of it that was essentially as good as the best copies anyone could make.

Copyright becomes problematic in digital information era

A situation now where once again, ordinary readers can make copies themselves. It doesn’t have to be done through centralised mass production, as in the printing press. Now this change in technology changes the situation in which copyright law operates. The idea of the bargain was that the public trades away its natural right to make copies, and in exchange gets a benefit. Well, a bargain could be a good one or a bad one. It depends on the worth of what you are giving up. And the worth of what you are getting. In the age of the printing press the public traded away a freedom that it was unable to use.

What are the consequences when copyright starts restricting activities that ordinary readers can do. Well, for one thing it’s no longer an industrial regulation. It becomes an imposition on the public. For another, because of this, you find the public’s starting to object to it You know, when it is stopping ordinary people from doing things that are natural in their lives you find ordinary people refusing to obey. Which means that copyright is no longer easy to enforce and that’s why you see harsher and harsher punishments being adopted by governments that are basically serving the publishers rather than the public.

Also, you have to question whether a copyright system is still beneficial. Basically, the thing that we have been paying is now valuable for us. Maybe the deal is a bad deal now. So all the things that made technology fit in well with the technology of the printing press make it fit badly with digital information technology.

Now what are some of the changes we might want to make in copyright law in order to adapt it to the situation that the public finds itself in?

Well the extreme change might be to abolish copyright law but that isn’t the only possible choice. There are various situations in which we could reduce the power of copyright without abolishing it entirely because there are various different actions that can be done with a copyright and there are various situations in which you might do them, and each of those is an independent question.

Should copyright cover this or not? In addition, there is a question of “How long?”. Copyright used to be much shorter in its period or duration, and it’s been extended over and over again in the past fifty years or so and in fact in now appears that the owners of copyrights are planning to keep on extending copyrights so that they will never expire again.

Possible solutions for copyright

In the future, we should draw lines between different kinds of work. Different works serve different purposes for their users. Until today we’ve had a copyright system that treats almost everything exactly alike except for music. There are broadly three kinds of works:

functional works,

works that express personal position,

and works that are fundamentally aesthetic.

Functional works include: computer software; recipes; textbooks; dictionaries and other reference works; anything that you use to get jobs done. For functional works people need very broad freedom, including the freedom to publish modified versions, because it necessary to have the freedom to publish a modified version to get job done.

The second category of works is works that express someone’s positions or views or experiences. For example, essays, offers to do business with people, statements of one’s legal position, memoirs, anything that says, whose point is to say what you think or you want or what you like. Book reviews and restaurant reviews are also in this category: it’s expressing a personal opinion or position. For these kinds of works, making a modified version is not a useful thing to do. Verbatim copying is the only thing that people need to have the freedom to do and because of this we can consider the idea that the freedom to distribute copies should only apply in some situations.

The third category of works is aesthetic works, whose main use is to be appreciated; novels, plays, poems, drawings in many cases, typically and most music. Typically it’s made to be appreciated. Now, they’re not functional people don’t have the need to modify and improve them, the way people have the need to do that with functional works. So it’s a difficult question: is it vital for people to have the freedom to publish modified versions of an aesthetic work.

If there is a system where those who commercially redistribute or maybe even those who are publishing a modified version might have to negotiate the sharing of the payments with the original developers and then this kind of scheme could be extended to those works too even if modified versions are permitted there could be some standard formula which could be in some cases renegotiated, so I think in some cases probably possible even with a system of permitting in some way publishing modified versions of the aesthetic works it may be possible still to have a kind of voluntary payment system.

There is evidence ideas like this are not unreasonable. As you know, there are already many personal-made-media for profit, which are very successful.

All in all, fundamentally, the stated purpose of copyright: to encourage righting is a worthwhile purpose, but we have to look at ways of ways to achieve it that are not so harsh, and not so constricting of the use of the works whose developments we have encouraged and I believe that digital technology is providing us with solutions to the problem as well as creating a context where we need to solve the problem.

This is the end of the talk, now are there questions?

Question 1: When is China began to have copyright?

As you know, printing was invented by ancient China people. If copyright was related to printing, China should have it. There are historical record in China similar to copyright, such as in Song Dynasty （1100）, the government prevented copying of published books as commercial goods.

In 1901, Qing dynasty published an official copyright law of China.

In the world, Western scholars believe copyright began in England in 1500s.

Question 2: How long is China’s copyright protection?

As a citizen in China, copyright last till 50 years after the author’s death. As an organization in China, copyright last till 50 years as the work published.

Thank you.

reference: Copyright versus Community in the Age of Computer Networks (2000)