The “moral right” idea seems absolutely horrible to me. That seems designed to make it difficult to make new works inspired partly by old works — I thought The Wind Done Gone shouldn’t have had any trouble at all (though I’m glad it wound up with the publisher making a donation to Morehouse; Mitchell herself was concerned with not depicting homosexuality or interracial sex).

Ideas aren’t like bicycles or dandelions — they’re non-rival, meaning that if I use an idea it doesn’t prevent you from using it, unless there’s a legal prohibition from doing so. In the case of the poem, I want to say, hey, two people read the poem and one bought the book; which is better than none and none. But I’m not hoping to make appreciable money from my writing.

I think maybe I have a different perspective on some of these issues because the role of copyright in philosophy is pretty negative. Commercial publishers charge a lot of money for subscribing to journals whose intellectual property was created by people working for free; it’s pure rake-off. (And the referees who do most of the work selecting the articles work for free too.) And then any restrictions on access are worse for the authors, who would rather have their articles as widely read as possible, and for the rest of the community. And when you see something like this; well, the publishers have a point, but I wish they wouldn’t say things like “Publishers argue that copyright laws must be rigorously applied in order to properly compensate their authors and uphold the tenure-and-publishing model on which much of peer review depends.” Except for textbooks and maybe some bestsellers like Theory of Justice, the authors are not compensated. I’ll never see a dime of royalties from my academic writing unless I put out a book, and even then I doubt I’ll see much more than a dime. So don’t mess up the e-reserve system on my account. I’d just as soon see philosophy publishing go all electronic.

But things may be very different for people who are hoping to earn money from books, as opposed to publishing in order to keep us in other jobs that we get paid for.

My brother, whose practice is much concerned with intellectual property, mostly software, says that in France authors have a “moral right”–one can’t alter or misuse their work, I think forever.

OTOH, as a poet, even an obscure one, I’ve had someone come up to me at a reading and say how much he liked a poem of mine, Carolyn had sent it to him in e-mail. So buy my book, I wanted to say, and was annoyed with Carolyn. But it turned out that at least one person she’d sent that poem to DID buy the book. So, fair use? Once it’s in e-mail, it’s loose, and the author may get neither credit nor cash for it.

By the way, you can use ideas that are out there. Ideas can’t be copyrighted, nor can facts. What is copyrighted is the particular form of expression of the ideas. But are the ideas really “out there” like dandelions on the lawn, or are they like bicycles on the lawn? An interesting copyright issue is the Richard Rodgers tune “Edelweiss,” from The Sound of Music. This is so convincing as a folk tune that people didn’t (and don’t) recognize that it has an author. Some church groups began to sing it with other words, and it began to be widely used. The Rodgers estate, though, defends its copyright–the tune belongs to the estate. (Completely irrelevant, but poignant: the lyric to Edelweiss is the last Oscar Hammerstein II ever wrote.)