But this is not all. My noble friend's plan is not merely to institute a lottery in which some writers will draw prizes and some will draw blanks. It is much worse than this. His lottery is so contrived that, in the vast majority of cases, the blanks will fall to the best books, and the prizes to books of inferior merit.
Take Shakespeare. My noble friend gives a longer protection than I should give to Love's Labour's Lost, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre; but he gives a shorter protection than I should give to Othello and Macbeth.
Take Milton. Milton died in 1674. The copyrights of Milton's great works would, according to my noble friend's plan, expire in 1699. Comus appeared in 1634, the Paradise Lost in 1668. To Comus, then, my noble friend would give sixty-five years of copyright, and to the Paradise Lost only thirty-one years. Is that reasonable? Comus is a noble poem: but who would rank it with the Paradise Lost? My plan would give forty-two years both to the Paradise Lost and to Comus.
Let us pass on from Milton to Dryden. My noble friend would give more than sixty years of copyright to Dryden's worst works; to the encomiastic verses on Oliver Cromwell, to the Wild Gallant, to the Rival Ladies, to other wretched pieces as bad as anything written by Flecknoe or Settle: but for Theodore and Honoria, for Tancred and Sigismunda, for Cimon and Iphigenia, for Palamon and Arcite, for Alexander's Feast, my noble friend thinks a copyright of twenty-eight years sufficient. Of all Pope's works, that to which my noble friend would give the largest measure of protection is the volume of Pastorals, remarkable only as the production of a boy. Johnson's first work was a Translation of a Book of Travels in Abyssinia, published in 1735. It was so poorly executed that in his later years he did not like to hear it mentioned. Boswell once picked up a copy of it, and told his friend that he had done so. "Do not talk about it," said Johnson: "it is a thing to be forgotten." To this performance my noble friend would give protection during the enormous term of seventy-five years. To the Lives of the Poets he would give protection during about thirty years. Well; take Henry Fielding; it matters not whom I take, but take Fielding. His early works are read only by the curious, and would not be read even by the curious, but for the fame which he acquired in the latter part of his life by works of a very different kind. What is the value of the Temple Beau, of the Intriguing Chambermaid, of half a dozen other plays of which few gentlemen have even heard the names? Yet to these worthless pieces my noble friend would give a term of copyright longer by more than twenty years than that which he would give to Tom Jones and Amelia.
Go on to Burke. His little tract, entitled the Vindication of Natural Society is certainly not without merit; but it would not be remembered in our days if it did not bear the name of Burke. To this tract my noble friend would give a copyright of near seventy years. But to the great work on the French Revolution, to the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, to the letters on the Regicide Peace, he would give a copyright of thirty years or little more.
And, Sir observe that I am not selecting here and there extraordinary instances in order to make up the semblance of a case. I am taking the greatest names of our literature in chronological order. Go to other nations; go to remote ages; you will still find the general rule the same. There was no copyright at Athens or Rome; but the history of the Greek and Latin literature illustrates my argument quite as well as if copyright had existed in ancient times. Of all the plays of Sophocles, the one to which the plan of my noble friend would have given the most scanty recompense would have been that wonderful masterpiece, the Oedipus at Colonos. Who would class together the Speech of Demosthenes against his Guardians, and the Speech for the Crown? My noble friend, indeed, would not class them together. For to the Speech against the Guardians he would give a copyright of near seventy years, and to the incomparable Speech for the Crown a copyright of less than half that length. Go to Rome. My noble friend would give more than twice as long a term to Cicero's juvenile declamation in defence of Roscius Amerinus as to the Second Philippic. Go to France. My noble friend would give a far longer term to Racine's Freres Ennemis than to Athalie, and to Moliere's Etourdi than to Tartuffe. Go to Spain. My noble friend would give a longer term to forgotten works of Cervantes, works which nobody now reads, than to Don Quixote. Go to Germany. According to my noble friend's plan, of all the works of Schiller the Robbers would be the most favoured: of all the works of Goethe, the Sorrows of Werter would be the most favoured. I thank the Committee for listening so kindly to this long enumeration. Gentlemen will perceive, I am sure, that it is not from pedantry that I mention the names of so many books and authors. But just as, in our debates on civil affairs, we constantly draw illustrations from civil history, we must, in a debate about literary property, draw our illustrations from literary history. Now, Sir, I have, I think, shown from literary history that the effect of my noble friend's plan would be to give to crude and imperfect works, to third-rate and fourth-rate works, a great advantage over the highest productions of genius. It is impossible to account for the facts which I have laid before you by attributing them to mere accident. Their number is too great, their character too uniform. We must seek for some other explanation; and we shall easily find one.
It is the law of our nature that the mind shall attain its full power by slow degrees; and this is especially true of the most vigorous minds. Young men, no doubt, have often produced works of great merit; but it would be impossible to name any writer of the first order whose juvenile performances were his best. That all the most valuable books of history, of philology, of physical and metaphysical science, of divinity, of political economy, have been produced by men of mature years will hardly be disputed. The case may not be quite so clear as respects works of the imagination. And yet I know no work of the imagination of the very highest class that was ever, in any age or country, produced by a man under thirty-five. Whatever powers a youth may have received from nature, it is impossible that his taste and judgment can be ripe, that his mind can be richly stored with images, that he can have observed the vicissitudes of life, that he can have studied the nicer shades of character. How, as Marmontel very sensibly said, is a person to paint portraits who has never seen faces? On the whole, I believe that I may, without fear of contradiction, affirm this, that of the good books now extant in the world more than nineteen-twentieths were published after the writers had attained the age of forty. If this be so, it is evident that the plan of my noble friend is framed on a vicious principle. For, while he gives to juvenile productions a very much larger protection
than they now enjoy, he does comparatively little for the works of men in the full maturity of their powers, and absolutely nothing for any work which is published during the last three years of the life of the writer. For, by the existing law, the copyright of such a work lasts twenty-eight years from the publication; and my noble friend gives only twenty-five years, to be reckoned from the writer's death.
What I recommend is that the certain term, reckoned from the date of publication, shall be forty-two years instead of twenty-eight years. In this arrangement there is no uncertainty, no inequality. The advantage which I propose to give will be the same to every book. No work will have so long a copyright as my noble friend gives to some books, or so short a copyright as he gives to others. No copyright will last ninety years. No copyright will end in twenty-eight years. To every book published in the course of the last seventeen years of a writer's life I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend gives; and I am confident that no person versed in literary history will deny this,-that in general the most valuable works of an author are published in the course of the last seventeen years of his life. I will rapidly enumerate a few, and but a few, of the great works of English writers to which my plan is more favourable than my noble friend's plan. To Lear, to Macbeth, to Othello, to the Fairy Queen, to the Paradise Lost, to Bacon's Novum Organum and De Augmentis, to Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, to Clarendon's History, to Hume's History, to Gibbon's History, to Smith's Wealth of Nations, to Addison's Spectators, to almost all the great works of Burke, to Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, to Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia, and, with the single exception of Waverley, to all the novels of Sir Walter Scott, I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend gives. Can he match that list? Does not that list contain what England has produced greatest in many various ways-poetry, philosophy, history, eloquence, wit, skilful portraiture of life and manners? I confidently therefore call on the Committee to take my plan in preference to the plan of my noble friend. I have shown that the protection which he proposes to give to letters is unequal, and unequal in the worst way. I have shown that his plan is to give protection to books in inverse proportion to their merit. I shall move when we come to the third clause of the bill to omit the words "twenty-five years," and in a subsequent part of the same clause I shall move to substitute for the words "twenty-eight years" the words "forty-two years." I earnestly hope that the Committee will adopt these amendments; and I feel the firmest conviction that my noble friend's bill, so amended, will confer a great boon on men of letters with the smallest possible inconvenience to the public.
Singularity Watch
Upload Your Life Now!
Mark L. Van Name
The first time you stand outside as a major storm is blowing in, you may not know how to interpret all the signs. From then on, however, all your senses will tell you what’s coming. You’ll see the clouds gather and the sky darken. You’ll smell the crisp air. You’ll feel the pressure changes wash invisibly over your body. You’ll breathe deeply and taste the air. You’ll know with a deep, animal certainty that forces beyond your control are gathering.
What you can never fathom until afterwards is exactly what those forces will end up doing and how the weather will play out, but you will know the phenomena signal a storm.
We live on the edge of a technology front the likes of which humanity has never seen. The rate of change in many of our key technologies is accelerating exponentially, and there’s no end in sight. Computing, communications and networking, biological engineering, and nanotechnology, to name four of the most active forces, are all evolving at an ever-increasing rate-and they’re all doing it at the same time.
Just as the astronomical singularity of a black hole is a place at which all the physical rules change, the singularity that may result from the continuing exponential rate of change of our technologies is a time at which all the rules of our lives may change, a point at which humans may transcend biology and non-human intelligences may surpass the computational power and the intelligence of our brains.
Note my use of the qualifying “may.” My goal with this column is not to persuade you that a singularity is coming, nor is it to defend a particular belief system. (If you want a lengthy and compelling persuasion, read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.)
Instead, my primary aim is to show you some of the cool edges of the coming storm, bits of techno-change that are interesting-and, every so often, scary-regardless of whether you believe we’re racing toward a singularity. Many of these developments also open the door to a wide array of issues and questions, and I want to encourage you to consider those issues and ponder those questions.
Some of the topics I’ll cover, such as the main focus of this month’s column, will be quite real, developments and technologies that exist right now, while others will be research or prototypes that are barely out of the lab. I’ll also try to point out where the trends underlying these bleeding-edge techs may take us.
When I was a kid and read about Tom Swift, Jr.’s Triphibian Atomicar and his other inventions, I didn’t realize I was a science-fiction reader; I didn’t even know the term “science fiction.” All I knew was that the world was a place where a smart, hard-working scientist might be able to do anything, create anything, be anything, and that universe of possibility was so insanely great that my young head almost hurt with the effort of containing my sense of wonder.
Today’s rapid technology advances frequently give me the same belief and the same hit of coolness, wonder, and awe. Let’s start with a fun one that’s happening right now.
Putting it all online, 2006-style
Most of us already depend more heavily on technological adjuncts to our memory than we’d like to admit. Whether those helpers take the form of old tech-grocery lists and post-it notes coordinating family schedules spring to mind-or employ devices that are a bit more au courant-I rely daily on the schedule I keep on my PC and replicate on my PDA-they are integral to our lives. The digital ones, such as my schedule, literally are small parts of our lives that we’ve digitized and uploaded.
So, too, are any letters whose source files we keep online, as are digital photos, digital videos, email messages, and on and on. Our increasing reliance on information technologies has the side effect of causing us to upload ever-growing, though still small, portions of our lives.
Most sf stories that include human uploads deal with them in terms of entire consciousnesses being digitized (sometimes with destructive results for th
e original brain carrier, sometimes not), but as our common fledgling efforts indicate, we don’t have to go anywhere near that far to put parts of our lives online.
The obvious question is, how far can you go right now?
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 77
