David Bellos - Who Owns This Sentence

31:16And from a copper plate on which engraving has been done, you can produce a hundred or a thousand, but probably not more, copies of the same image in black and white. And these became very popular for decoration, for putting on walls, because they're much cheaper than having somebody paint a painting for you. And his argument was that, well, you know, books are the products of a printing press. Lithographic prints are the products of a printing press. The one is protected and the other should be too because they are both – and it's a fairly specious argument. I mean, you know, if you want to believe it, you believe it and if not, it's easy to refute.

32:08There are very different kinds of presses and they have very different kinds of distribution as well. But he won. I mean, he got it through the House of Commons and it got royal assent. It's surprising. I mean, law is usually very, very slow but in this case, it happened in a few months. Wow. We don't quite know why, who pulled which strings, But Hogarth was a very well-known and much admired figure in the arts. And he got his way. So that's the first step. And so engravings got protected. I mean, initially, only engravings that were designed and engraved by the same person. So it really was Hogarth's law.

32:47It protected him. Thirty years later, it was amended to protect all engravings. And so that's how maps and charts and logarithmic tables and so forth became copyrightable. Gotcha. When I immediately started to think, I mean, if I'm going to draw a painting, I'm going to go out and engrave it to protect it. Because even though my painting might not be protected, the engraving would be. And therefore, I could sue based on the image, not necessarily the painting that I wanted to create. And so you get into, you know, to your point, it's like regulatory capture. It's just you're doing it to protect yourself in another form.

33:24That's exactly right. And a market sprang up amongst painters who, as painters at that time, had no control over the work other than the ability to sell it or to obtain a commission for making it. They started basically hiring engravers and paying them a fee to make engravings of their paintings so that images of them could be circulated, which would increase the market for their actual work. And at the same time, give them control over the circulation of those images because they were copyrightable. And that's how little by little the fine arts got brought in to the field of copyright. Yeah. And I think of – I mean if I was going to give another theme for thinking about the regulatory repercussions, I would give it a theme of perverse incentives.

34:15If you like. Paying an engraver to protect your art is a very perverse incentive, but it's what you did based in the structure that you sat under, to your point. You discuss Upton's life of Washington versus I think it was Sparks who edited the writings of George Washington in comparison. How does this story – can you kind of teach our audience about this story? And how does this show what I would argue is a terrible misstep towards business protection or rent seeking? Well, that's a case that arose in the United States and it arose in the next century, in the 19th century. And the question was this.

34:56Could the publisher of the complete works of George Washington claim ownership of those texts when they were reused in a much shorter work intended for schools about the life of Washington? Okay. Washington himself has nothing to do with this. Yeah. He's nowhere to be found. He's dead. No money flows to the Washington estate out of it. So it is entirely a battle between the owners of these vague things called rights and the freedom of other people to use the actual texts of those works. And would you believe it? The publisher won. and effectively put the actual text of Washington's letters under control.

35:46But I mean, copyright didn't last as long then as it does now. Sure. And it's all been got over. But for a number of years, you could not publish books about Washington that included, or without permission or payment of a fee, that included significant extracts from all that there was, I mean, from everything that Washington ever wrote. Sure. So the Reform Act of 1909 provided protection, like we're talking about. What was the term of that protection? And was this a fairly practical approach at that time when this Reform Act came about? The Reform Act of 1909 is a milestone in many ways because it incorporated into American law some of the derivative rights that we now – that are now part of copyright and that hadn't been before.

36:38But it did so at a time when the possibility of making derivative works was rapidly changing because the gramophone had been invented. The pianola had been invented. The movie industry had been invented, but the 1909 law doesn't actually give a ruling on any of those things. There were supplements to it in 1911 and 1919 that extended its scope. But the general idea – the 1909 law sets the term of copyright at 28 years, renewable once to 56. So again, post-mortem copyright doesn't arise in 20th century America, not till the very end of the late part of the century. So for the First World War, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War, international recognition is patchy and not consistent.

37:40And there's no such thing as post-mortem rights. And so it remains, well, if not a tiny issue, it's still a niche issue that concerns only a small part of the economy and a relatively small number of people. But yeah, the 1909 law also introduced something that was to have epochal consequences, which was in I believe it's paragraph 62 of a relatively short bill. It just says for the purposes of this act, the word author shall include employer. Which obviously begs a much larger parent to come into the story. That's right. To say that parts of our regulatory framework and our laws are a circus act is actually an understatement.

38:29You tell the story of the lithography of two circus companies. What was the inherent issue in that situation and why was copyright a big deal that had to be adjudicated? Well, that happened a few years before the 1909 reform. And in fact, the 1909 reform refers back to that particular case. Okay. Yes, there were traveling circuses traveled around America and had printers print big posters, thousands of them, ranging in size from little leaflets to great billboards. And they were colored posters for the most part and it was the biggest part of the whole business of the lithographing industry in the United States at that time.

39:17and one circus called the Wallace Circus ran out of posters when it was somewhere on tour in the and contracted another printer, a different printer from the original one, to run off a few thousand more for its next publicity campaign. And the original printer of those designs, one of whose staff members had designed the things, sued them for copyright infringement, claimed that the copyright in those original posters lay with the company that produced them. Sure. And again, he won. And that, you might say, is the forerunner of that paragraph 62 in the 1989 Act, where it's formally established that the author is the company.

40:05Yeah. Which is an abuse of the language. I mean, whatever you want to do to protect companies and their businesses, is just not true to say that the employer of an artist is an artist. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance. If you're an investor who fears stock market failure like I do and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit SmeadCap.com.

40:40Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by UMB Distribution Services, LLC, not affiliated. Well, I think the other problem is, you know, thinking back to Solomon, right? There's nothing new under the sun. and he talked a lot about his life. Well, we're not talking about your life, David. We're not talking about my life.

41:14We're talking about corporate lives, which are far longer than human lives. And therefore - Or can be, yes. Sometimes they're a lot shorter. Yeah, sometimes they can be. But by the way, particularly here in America, we find ways to create short run companies in some cases. But I only pointed out because I think the flip side has to be accounted for, which is the public good. And you discuss in the book what literacy rates did from like 1780 to 1880, and you directly point towards what had happened in the proliferation of what I'll call great works of the world and antiquity and those writings being published more often.

41:51Can you teach our listeners what literacy did and therefore why these books in the public good were so effective? The reasons for the rise in literacy is something I can't really comment on except that it was the great tide of history. People learned to read. They learned to read partly because printed matter was becoming cheaper. It was becoming cheaper because of the mechanization of printing presses. It was becoming cheaper because of the invention of cheaper ways of making paper. But I think that this tide would have moved forward perhaps more slowly, but it would have moved forward all the same.

42:28That was the drift of history in that modern period. So, you know, you have to sort of think that, well, through the 19th century, most readers of new books were new readers. That's to say they had learned to read and not necessarily at school. And a country like America, but also Britain and France, they wanted more literate readers, literate citizens. Literate citizens could vote. and if they could vote, surely they ought to be able to read and educate themselves. And so there was a conjoining interest of promoting education and promoting books and therefore also producing a regulatory framework in which it was possible and profitable for people to write books and newspapers.

43:19So it really is the century of the triumph of the book and of print matter. By the end of the 19th century, pretty much all what you might call now developed countries were close to 100 % literate. And literacy became increasingly a basic requirement for leading the life of a citizen. I mean, you had to fill in forms. It became a more bureaucratic kind of society. so in that period the beneficiaries of intellectual property rights were well for a large part national heroes they were great writers they were prominent figures they were also politicians many politicians were writers disraeli was a novelist and and the system bit by bit stumblingly and clumsily but nonetheless sort of irresistibly became internationalized except for the United States which stayed out of international arrangements for as long as it possibly could.

44:22Yeah now you talk about the history of the Red Cross you talk about the history of what began as kind of patchwork agreements between France and Belgium and then eventually you know was born into what that what what you refer to as the Berne Convention of 1886. Who was involved in that initially? How many countries now comprise that? And, you know, why was the United States so late to that game? The United States, I'll begin with the last question. The United States was late to that game for a very simple reason. It was a young country. It wanted to educate its growing immigrant population. And it wanted cheap books.

45:02And most of the books that it wanted cheap were actually written and published in Britain for the English language but also in France and Germany and Italy. And it was much simpler for the United States to say we can't be bothered with international – we haven't got anything to sell yet. Though in fact it did. There were many American writers who were immensely famous in Europe like Harriet Beecher Stone and Fenimore Cooper. But the view of the United States was that only American citizens were entitled to copyright protection. And it remained that way for a very long time. So back to Byrne and the Red Cross.

45:44Well, I mentioned the Red Cross simply because it's the first truly multilateral international voluntary organization ever founded in the world. Sure. And it provided a model on which the Berne Convention was based. That's to say that signatures to the Red Cross committed themselves to obliging by a general set of rules without obliging any of those member states to change their own laws. Sure. And that was the model that Berne took. It was a voluntary convention coming together of countries that agreed to certain basic standards in the way they treated each other mutually. But they didn't have to change any domestic laws in order to sign the convention.

46:31So that's the relevance of the Red Cross. And the other relevance is why the Berne Convention was held in Switzerland. That's because Switzerland had already become the sort of recognized home of international cooperation and neutrality. Yeah. You'd also pointed out that Russia joined that really late, like the United States did. And at first when you said the Russian system of patronage was bizarre, and you explained that through the AK-47, obviously Kalashnikov's fame. I love that story, so I'd love you to share that. But I actually walked away agreeing with you that the way we state-administrate these reminds me a lot more like Russia here in the United States than I would have assumed from the outset.

47:15Please don't say Russia. The Kalashnikov story is a story of the Soviet Union. Really, sure. Yeah, of Soviet fame. Yeah. Russia didn't join the Berne Convention prior to the revolution for quite different reasons. But similar to those of America, the Russian upper classes were completely francophone. And they thought that their theaters would collapse if they had to pay royalties to French authors. They had some wonderful novelists, but they still mostly read novels from England and France. And they didn't want to pay for the privilege of doing what they'd been always doing. So they stayed aloof from Bern, but they were observers at the convention, but didn't sign up.

48:02The Soviet Union was a different kettle of fish because the Soviet Union sort of abolished private property almost completely. It had an egalitarian view, but an immense respect for its writers and creators. and it developed quite elaborate systems for making them privileged members of Soviet society. And keeping things in proportion, I mean, if you were a writer who was approved of by the authorities in Soviet Russia and not totally idle and became a member of the Writers' Union, you had a very comfortable standard of living in a way that, you know, the beat poets didn't in America. There was a system to support them.

48:50The Kalashnikov story is just very simple. That's really to do with patent law.

48:58Kalashnikov produced his tinkering, engineering tinkering that produced an automatic rifle that became the model of its kind and sold hundreds of millions of copies. And of course, being the Soviet Union, Kalashnikov had no property right in his invention. Sure. But he got lots of kudos for it. He got promoted through the ranks. He was given a personal motor car. He was given medals and perfectly satisfied with his lot as an inventor. Sure. And I liken this to many things that happen in supposedly non-Soviet regimes such as our own. that the medals you get, the residences you get, the larger offices you get for having contributed to your company's profitability, are really quite similar in structure to the ways in which the Soviet Union rewarded both its writers and its inventors.

50:00Sure. When I thought a lot about actually the patent office, so when you send your patent in, they approve your patent or not. They don't have to accept your patent. If it is, it gets given a number. If it's not, it's waiting to be approved. I call it patent pending, as we all know. And I thought about it as, does it make any sense for the state to administrate a yes or no system? That seems like, to your point on the Soviet system, you'd be picking winners and losers based on what you think is right. And you might not be right to make those decisions. So I actually asked myself the question, coming from the investment business perspective, Should we actually have like a self-regulatory organization that just admits that it was entered into the register and therefore it still can be adjudicated in courts?

50:42But the courts would decide the rights and wrongs rather than the patent office saying yes or no. Because at least it's more of an open market system that's not administered by the state, which the Soviet system is always the state is first. I don't know the answer to that. It's a little bit outside of my domain. But with patents, to know whether a patent is truly original and is worthy of protection in its own right, surely in most if not all cases, that takes some very expert advice. Exactly. And I don't think that – for me, it doesn't really much matter whether it's the copyright office or the patent office or a court.

51:29They're both – all of them would have to be listening to the guys who actually know about this stuff. Correct. We'll come back to that. Yeah, we'll come back to that. But I – Copyright is quite different. Yeah. So you talk about Leo Tolstoy. He goes to – he dies and he goes to give away his goods to an effect public and the laws don't allow him to do it. That's correct. So even when we want things to go to the public domain and bless, I'll call it, society, the laws, in his case, in Russia, weren't allowed to take it to a non-person. It couldn't just go to the public as a good. Well, I think it's true today.

52:07Yeah. You try making a will leaving your house to the public. I mean, you have to leave it to an institution, to a thing. But just to make it free and available, well, no. A copyright persists for 70 years after your death, and it has to belong to your natural heirs, whether you like it or not. You can't override that except by leaving it to some sort of institution or body or a university or whatever. But the public in general doesn't exist in the law. Yeah. So a couple of things came to mind when you were going – when I was in this section of the book. In some of our old branding, we originally started our company in Seattle.

52:46So we actually used a Pike Place Market sign. Well, to your point about when in doubt, you don't use it because there could be a problem by someone else bringing claim to that good. We actually, you know, we ended up having to reach out to the Pike Place Market Association who claims right to that. Now, they charge a nominal fee, so it wasn't that big of a deal. But again, you're now in a situation where someone says, well, I have a claim to that. Now, whether that's true or not, it might cost you thousands of dollars. To find out. To find out. So you just pay the fee. It's like a toll. And ultimately, this idea of a royalty for the monarch was a tax, right?

53:23And we're in these royalty worlds where they are a tax on any decision, any idea that come with these images. So I thought a lot about that. Funny enough, in some of our current branding, we have some images that are in the public domain. Therefore, there's no rights to them. And there are some that we pay Getty Images or other parties like that. And if someone says, what's the difference between the two, I'd be like, well, I'm not going to tell you. you. Well, I mean, Getty Images and other similar image banks claim copyright in the photograph of the image. Yeah. And that's how they get away with it, that you have to pay Getty Images if you want to have the Mona Lisa on the cover of your new book.

54:04Sure. It's not because they own the Mona Lisa, they own that image of it. Yeah. It's very, well, it makes you want to laugh, actually. Yeah. And I'll come back to a quote in a second. But Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper, you wrote, it enters the public domain kind of at a certain point. Can you explain like Tolstoy couldn't give his work to the public? How did the Prince and the Pauper not completely enter the public domain at once? That's a different story and it's about the mismatch between copyright protection terms in the United States and in other countries. Sure. And that was very annoying in the first half of the 20th century, where American authors who only had at most 56 years protection here, but life plus 30 or life plus 50 when they were published in Britain or France, it was a complete muddle as to knowing what was in copyright and what was not.

55:08And the one thing I will say in favor of the monstrous 1976 Copyright Act of the U.S. is it at least sorted that one out. Sure. That makes sense. I have to say this quote because it's such a great line. You quoted Teddy Roosevelt in your book. He said, quote, Our copyright laws are imperfect in definition, confused and inconsistent in expression. They omit provision for many article which under modern reproductive processes are entitled to protection. They are difficult for the courts to interpret and impossible for the Copyright Office to administrate with satisfaction to the public, end quote.

55:44He said this in 1909, if I remember correctly from my notes. I find it interesting. First off, Teddy Roosevelt, we all know, is a trust buster nowadays, and I find that analogously bizarre for a trust buster to use those words and think of the regime and the world and the power structures we have today. Isn't that just as true as the day he said it as it is right now? Yes. Yes. Because I think so. I'm sitting here reading your book and I'm like, gosh, the framework is so bizarre and it's very confusing. And to his point, it's tough for the courts to adjudicate. I mean, the amount of time these trials take and what it becomes is a game of who has the most money to go through the process, not who's right or wrong.

56:31Well, that is an unfortunate consequence of, well, not so much of copyright law, but of the American legal system or judicial system that undertaking civil action in the courts is very expensive. But that expense itself obviously benefits or tilts the balance in favor of those with lots of money against those with not lots of money. Unfortunately, I think that's true not just with copyright law but with other kinds of regulations as well. But in the case of copyright law, it's only very rarely that an intellectual property covered by copyright is actually worth that sort of money. And as a result, the vast majority of litigation on copyright infringement is settled out of court.

57:22Sure. Which is fine except that with settlements out of court and the details kept confidential, it leaves everybody else in just as much of a muddle as before as to what the boundaries are and what are the rules that we should be playing by. Sure. So just that, as I'm sure you understand from life as well as from my book, that does have a tremendously chilling effect on all kinds of creative activities. Sure. You conform what you're doing to avoid any possibility of litigation, even if there's 99 % chance that you're right. Sure. When I think of – to your point, because you don't know the settlements, you don't know what the market practice is and therefore you're effectively augmenting the precedents that came prior.

58:14So I love this. I didn't know this. This is almost to your point. It's humorous. It's comical. It's unbelievable. If you try to sell something you don't have copyright of, what's your penalty? I forgot. I had written it. It was$2 ,500 maximum. Is that it? Yeah. It's crazy. And I think there's a possible criminal penalty, but your only statutory fine is$2 ,500. So, yeah, you get perverse incentives where someone's going to put a sign on anything and say, pay me, because even if they're wrong, it's only$2 ,500. That's right. That's one of the few things that is actually a criminal infringement of copyright is to slap a copyright notice on something that's not copyright and to make money from it.

58:58But because it's a criminal offense, not a civil offense, only the state can prosecute you. So does it lift its finger? No. And my very learned informants on this matter, in the copyright office, in fact, I give the figure that since the beginning of this century, only 14 cases of this type have ever been brought. 14! Interesting. And, you know, there are a quarter of a million books published every year. Sure. So to play on that, I'm going to ask, you know, since everyone has to talk about AI, you have to have it in your book. And that begets my next question. Will we see the finest examples of someone trying to copyright something they don't own via AI?

59:45or maybe the inverse will actually come true, which is that AI will democratize the wealth of information that we have that people have been playing regulatory capture with for years because ultimately they will have stolen it in a very unique and transformative way via the algorithms they use. Do you see AI as just a bigger problem or possibly a savior to the public good? At present, I do not think the latter is at all likely that it's a savior of the public good, but I could be wrong. The current squabbles over whether AI companies should pay license fees for the use of the material on which they train their large language models seems to me not exactly a storm in a teacup, but it's a limited argument.

1:00:40And it could go either way because, after all, I can read all the books in the library. And if I were very clever, I could then write a big book that's just like some of them. That's what people do. So if I'm allowed to do that without infringing copyright, why should a machine not do it? Why shouldn't a machine have the same right to read books and then to produce another one? Sure. Obviously, people might answer because it's a machine or because inside the process that it uses, it has to make temporary copies. I think those are almost theological arguments. And I don't really mind which way around that is decided because it probably will be decided fairly soon since there are cases pending on that issue.

1:01:34I think a much more important and potentially quite sinister issue is what is the copyright status of a work? And now we know it can be not just a text. It can be a picture, even a movie or a song produced not by any human but by a machine. To whom do the rights in that work? And as you now know, it's a big bundle of rights. To whom should that be ascribed? The Copyright Office only registers copyrights in the name of someone. Can it ascribe the rights in the name of a machine? Should we then be paying our royalty fees to a machine? Now, obviously, the only two options, as far as I can see, is this, that the copyright will be ascribed to the owner of the algorithm, right?

1:02:33Okay. Or it will be deemed that the product of an AI algorithm, whether it's a picture or a song or a novel, is in the public domain from the start. Okay. If the latter, which seems to me perfectly healthy in one sense, then we will be in this bizarre position where we can't know whether something that's out there has copyright protection or not. And copyright may crumble as it were from – because there will be more and more of it. Yeah. And I don't like that. But I don't like the opposite solution either at all, because the owners of the successful algorithms that power really successful AI generators will be very few indeed.

1:03:25It will be an even smaller number of large global corporations that own those algorithms. And so we'll end up with pretty much everything belonging to a handful of people. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on the show. You know, we recently hit the top 10 investing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and even number one in the business category in several countries. As you may know, this show is brought to you by Smeet Capital Management. Smeet Capital Management understands how frustrating and illogical the stock market can be. If you are searching for funds with a proven track record, give the Smeet funds a look.

1:04:00Or better yet, reach out at SmeetCap.com. And don't forget to mention that you're a fan of the podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principal. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by UMB Distribution Services, LLC, not affiliated.

1:04:30The only positive I can take out of the latter to your point is that we'll get into a world where the large owners of copyright will be at war with the large owners of AI technology. And I thought, man, this could be real intergalactic warfare at its finest hour. That's a lot of power coming to clash. But in many respects, those are the powers that we probably need to clash to beat each other down, to therefore raise the public in some cases. So I thought about kind of these two warring factions. And actually, it might be ultimately good for the public to see those two factions come to a head with each other.

1:05:07Well, if they take each other to pieces, there might be some opening there for an expansion of a genuine public domain that could be identified as such and could be enjoyed and reused. But the problem is that the non-copyright works produced by AI are just going to be progressively watered down versions of what's already there. There isn't going to be anything new. By definition, there can't be anything new in the product of an AI algorithm. Yeah. When we're talking about these groups, I mean, can you just briefly explain Section 230? Because I think this is so important. I mean, whenever I say to people, oh, you know, Section 230, I have people look with glazed over eyes, say, I don't even know what you're talking about.

1:05:52And I think to myself, this is maybe one of the most fundamental errors that we've made in the history of the public domain looking back 200 years, plausibly I would argue, on this subject. So can you explain Section 230 and can you explain where you think that's got us because of Section 230? Oh, well, it's perfectly clear where it's got us. It's got us Facebook and Instagram and X and all those things. Sure. That's what it's got us. Section 230, which is also incorporated into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, comes a little bit later, is the ground rule for internet service providers. It provides a safe haven for the owners of internet services and makes them not liable for copyright infringement or indeed for any other offense that might be committed by their users who post text or images or whatever on their sites.

1:06:54In other words, it is a total innovation in the long history of publishing and censorship control and regulation where responsibility is not matched with a beneficial ownership. Sure.

1:07:42are liable for what they post. And the ISP is not. So that's why Facebook prospers and all similar social media platforms and internet services. Yeah. I thought a lot about where you started your book. Here's you're the author. You write something. You could be quartered and you could die and someone else could make money. We're back right where we started. You could be held liable and the publisher could make out like a king or queen on profits. So the idea, again, back to that framework of if the profit and the liability are not held by the same party, we're creating very perverse incentives in our societies.

1:08:31Yes. That's partly why we wrote this book, that things are not as they should be. How they could be mended is a whole other question and we want people to start talking about that but on the basis of understanding how we got where we are and what the issues are. With respect to book publishing, it depends how you look at it. Yes, Alex and I signed a contract with the publisher in which we accept liability for anything unlawful that might arise in the book. Yeah. In practice, though, if there were to be a claim against us for copyright infringement or incitement to mass violence or whatever, the publisher would, in all cases I can imagine, stand by the author because the text necessarily has gone through pretty close legal reading.

1:09:26and we're all satisfied that there's nothing in it that is not legitimate. So we wouldn't be thrown to the wolves instantly. But in the end, when it comes to the crunch, the formal position is that, yes, we are liable. The publisher gets the profit and shares a bit of it with us through the form of royalties. So there is a certain degree of balancing. But the abstract position is crazy. Yeah. When I think a lot of, and you touched on this, you talk about how important the codec was in the history of publishing. You know, prior to that, we use papyrus or scroll, as we think of it. And I was just at the Museum of the Bible, and they have the original codec there at the Museum of the Bible, which is quite a sight to behold and an incredible story.

1:10:18and Andrew Pedigree, who wrote the book at war, who's written a lot about libraries, he pointed out that the book has a distinct advantage on the internet in that you always know where you stopped, right? Versus the papyrus, you'd have to scroll all the way down to where you were. Put a piece of lead in it, yeah. Correct. So I distinctly think in the copyright world, the book has a key advantage on even these, I'll call it these behemoth publishers, if you will. So I still think there are things that have to be grappled with there. Let me just ask you this. I'm going to come, I'm God. I'm not, but I'll just theorize I'm God for a day.

1:10:51And I come to you and I say, hey, you're going to be king of the universe. What do you think is a fair limited use or limited time of use for a copyright of, say, your book? If God was going to bequeath you a proper right, what do you think that would be if you had to set that rule as king or queen? Oh, my lifetime, full stop. Okay. So just as soon as you're dead, it's over? Yes. Okay. And then I wouldn't have to make a complicated will about who's my executor and – it's a great nuisance to have a literary estate to leave. Sure. No, I think – also I think that only restriction of copyright protection to lifetime of creator is the only way you could possibly justify these arguments about copyright serving an author's interest because the author has no interest when he's dead.

1:11:42Sure. I thought a lot about this too. I mean, we pick stocks for a living. So we talk about stock pickers and their track record and their time-serving investors. And when I die, my track record is over. And my ability to profit for my track record is over. So I agree with you. That makes sense. That seems pretty obvious to me. But again, I just want to ask the question because, I mean, I think you talked about where Marilyn Monroe, she goes from being in the public domain and then the Copyright Act of 1976 comes about, and she's back protected over again after that, even though she was in the public domain for a few years.

1:12:20That's not the Marilyn Monroe story. The Marilyn Monroe story is about publicity rights. Oh, that's right. Publicity rights. Yeah, yeah. But yes, yes. When the Copyright Term Extension Act was passed in the 1990s in the US, it's known as the Sonny Bono Act or as the - Yes, that's right. The Mickey Mouse Act. That's right. It was retroactive so that works that had fallen into the public domain in the preceding 19.9 years went back into copyright for a greater or longer period. And that was something that many people felt to be really improper and also totally pointless because if they'd fallen into public domain, it's because their authors had deceased.

1:13:06Sure. So that it really affected the grandchildren of writers of the 1920s and 30s. It seemed just a crazy idea. But it went through Congress and that became the law. Well, I think it's a – I mean what a miserable way to go through your adulthood. sitting there suing people for libel and claims against an estate when it's like your grandparents or your parents, that's your life is suing other people to protect an economic interest that, to your point, I don't think they deserve. I mean, that just seems like a miserable way to go through life. But then again, if you're their lawyer, they're the greatest customer in the history of the world.

1:13:51That's right. But I mean, that touches on a much bigger question of whether laws of inheritance are justifiable or not. And I think we'll leave that out of today's discussion. Yeah, we should. We should. But given the laws of inheritance and the length of copyright, yes, there are small numbers of families whose principal activity is defending what they will see as their patrimony, but which is something created by a guy or a gal they probably never even knew. Yeah, I totally agree. Some things we didn't talk about. We didn't talk about, I mean, you tie this directly to the U.S. Constitution, and you talked about some of the issues you have with what the Constitution says versus where law has gone and precedence has gone since then.

1:14:33I thought that was really wonderful. Next time in Guernsey, I'm going to register myself in Guernsey. Thank you for giving me that. Our readers should go read that section. It's a wonderful little picture of what insane things people plausibly will do here as we look forward to protect their rights. The other thing I would say to all of our listeners is you must go look at the Steamboat Willie images that are in the public domain because obviously they now are. Not all forms, but certain forms are, I would say. But you may still be infringing business trademark. Correct. If you use them in certain ways.

1:15:11Correct. Yeah, I know. And so to your point, you might not want to use it regardless, but supposedly it's in the public domain. And, you know, I just wanted to ask you, there's all these interesting stories and I loved all of this. I was just continue to go through my notes about, you know, what postmortem meant at one time. I love the idea of apprenticeship in Venice. And that became apprenticeship times two, times three, times four. What else do you think needs to be mentioned about your story? Is there a focal point that you think you touched that you had not expected to discuss in the book or something that you think other books have missed tied to your work?

1:15:51Yes. It's something that I came to realize in the course of writing the book. The copyright, or IP more generally, the copyright especially, is really different from other forms of human wealth. because you can argue about who the land should belong to and you can campaign for it to be more concentrated or more distributed in different models. You can argue about who should have access to education and housing and health. But you can't, with copyright, really think along those terms because the design of copyright from the bottom up is to take money from the many and to give it to the few on the assumption that if you weren't doing that, there'd be no reason for the thing to – I mean, if there were more writers than readers, we'd be in a different world.

1:16:45It is inherently, essentially, a money pump that brings resources from the broad public to a small group. And when that small group were people like Charles Dickens or Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway, nobody grumbled. It seemed perfectly fair. These were people you would want to honor and financially benefit. But since the 1976 US law and more importantly, even the Marrakesh Treaty of 1998, which makes it obligatory to abide by burn rules in order to be a member of the World Trade Organization. Sure. It's become an enormous device for the transfer of resources from poor countries to rich countries and within rich countries from the general public to a really rather small group of extremely prosperous corporations.

1:17:49And there's no way of reforming copyright as far as I can see such that it wouldn't do that. The only thing you can do with copyright would be to reduce its scope, its range or its term. But that's never been done. Every change to copyright law since 1710 to the day before yesterday has been to extend either its term in number of years or its range in the sense of the different types of media that have copyright protection. or its scope in terms of the depth of those rights, of the bundle of rights that it constitutes. Turning it round is obviously going to be extremely awkward because, well, like with all laws, we've got used to it.

1:18:39I mean, everybody sort of copes. Lots of people have vested interests in it being this way because that's what they do. So I'm not particularly optimistic about ever getting out of this vice-like grip of copyright law. On the other hand, I really think I really would like people like yourself, but also publishers and lawyers and readers and cinema goers to start thinking whether this really is the way things ought to be and how would you unscrramble it into something slightly less outrageous. Sure. When I think a lot about the information theory, the value of myself to society is the amount of time I save other people in their lives.

1:19:31And that is the wealth I accrue. But to the information theory's point, that's only dot, dot, dot during my lifetime because that's the time that I save other people time. And so I completely agree with that. And I thought a lot about this as I was reading your book to ask the question. Also, in other properties, you usually pay things like property tax. Well, I can hold a copyright without paying a property tax, for example. And therefore, if the state is going to allow these quote unquote rights, they should be treating it like all other property, which is it gets taxed, which is a whole other idea because then I might not want to hold the copyright if I can't pay the tax.

1:20:12So again, I think to your point, I'm an optimist by nature. So I'm optimistic that people will see this. But to your point on information and knowledge and beauty, that is what the public domain is missing in many cases, not in the sense of 20 years, but in the longer sense of, say, 100 years. That's what we're really missing out on. I will say this to readers. This is a very humorous read. I know David touched at that. I know I touched at that. and it's a very fun history to discuss, very unique history. For our audience, you should read who owns the sentence because like your own family plausibly, not everything was planned and well thought out.

1:20:55Some of our current laws around intellectual property are in place because like your family too, the mood was right and the person that was willing to pay the most got what they wanted. If you enjoyed this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to a book with legs. Give us a review to others about the books and great authors. like David Bellos that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com. That's podcast at smeedcap.com. You can also send your suggestions to us on X.

1:21:29Our handle is at smeedcap. Thank you for joining us for A Book With Legs podcast. We look forward to the next episode. And thank you for listening to me. Thank you for listening to A Book With Legs, a podcast brought to you by Smead Capital Management. The material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice. You can learn more about Smead Capital Management and its products at SmeadCap.com or by calling your financial advisor.