Latest Script-ed published

The latest edition of the excellent Script-ed open law journal has just been published. Of particular note to an Irishman abroad is Dr. Matthew Rimmer's article Bloomsday: Copyright Estates and Cultural Festivals in which he criticises the trustees of the James Joyce's Estate for arguing that "the James Joyce and Ulysses exhibition staged by the National Library of Ireland could breach copyright by displaying manuscripts and draft notebooks by James Joyce" and for taking other aggressive copyright actions, such as threatening to sue the Irish government over a festival to celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday (16 June 1904, the day on which Ulysses was set). Dr Rimmer concludes:

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The controversy over "Rejoyce Dublin 2004" provides a cautionary tale about copyright law and cultural institutions. The Joyce Estate has brought an array of legal actions to control the publication and communication of the works of James Joyce. Such litigation has had a chilling effect upon literary scholarship, anthologies, music compositions, public performances, and cultural exhibitions. As Robert Spoo observes:

Extremely long copyrights have given artificial voice and weight to the personal predilections of one who, in the absence of such rights, would be an ordinary participant in the life of art and letters like most of the rest of us. These protracted monopolies create, or permit, peculiar and unaccustomed distortions of the public sphere; they encourage attempts to re-privatize that space, to reclaim it in the interests of family privacy or personal taste. They allow a mere right-holder to become a privileged and arbitrary custodian of culture. And all of this would be exactly as it should be were these monopolies confined to one generation or two. But to see this capricious veto power being exercised at a period so startlingly remote from the cultural and historical origins of the work in question is dispiriting.

The case of the Joyce Estate is not an isolated one. There have been a spate of similar incidents involving the custodians of the work of JD Salinger, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, to name a few. The trend towards copyright term extension has invested copyright estates with a great deal of power. There will be increasing conflict with scholars, biographers, artists, and performers who wish to use such copyright work before the expiry of the life of the author plus seventy years.

There is a need to revise and design copyright law in order to protect the interests of libraries, archives, galleries, and cultural institutions. As Brendan Howlin observed in the Irish Parliament:

Libraries are an extraordinary community resource. There has been an extraordinary development in the State-wide library network in the past five to ten years. Libraries are not just repositories of books which people take out and return within a week or a fortnight. For many communities, libraries are now a historical, cultural and artistic hub. We need to acknowledge that in a way we have not done up to now and allow libraries to develop to their full potential.

There should be stronger mechanisms to guarantee access to copyright works - such as a wide range of exceptions for fair dealing, or better still an open-ended defence of fair use, extensive exemptions for libraries and cultural institutions, and a flexible compulsory licensing scheme. Such revisions would promote the original purpose of copyright law to promote the wider public interest in education, research, and learning.

The ad hoc reforms of the Irish Parliament do not go far enough. The extension of the copyright term should be wound back in Europe and elsewhere, because of its impoverishment of the public domain. There is no need for the relatives of authors to enjoy such extensive post-mortem rights. The work of James Joyce should be allowed to fall into the public domain. As Robert Spoo comments:

When Ulysses finally enters the public domain worldwide, we will witness, just as we did some years ago when copyrights in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man expired in the United States, an explosion of cheap reprints and new editions of Joyce’s Irish epic. We will also see uninhibited use of the work in streamed Internet performances, public readings, dramatic and cinematic adaptations, and multimedia digital presentations complete with period photographs, Dublin maps, sound clips of Irish songs, and hyperlinks to critical interpretations and manuscript sources. On that red-letter day for the public domain, Ulysses will finally take its place with The Odyssey as raw myth-making material for some future national epic. Indeed, it can be argued that a work does not really become a “classic” until it is unqualifiedly available for cultural exploitation. It would follow that overlong copyright protection is an inhibition on the full organic development of a classic.

The time has come for the work of James Joyce to be emancipated from the private possession of his estate, and become part of the intellectual commons, free to be interpreted, adapted, and performed by scholars and artists alike.

He's right that there is no need for relatives, in most cases, to have such extensive post mortem rights, though I don't hold out a lot of hope in the short to medium term that the term of copyright is going to get reigned in.