The Joyce estate and copyright
James Joyce’s estate has promised to sue anyone who publicly reads from Ulysses during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday.
Congratulations. This is what copyright law buys us. Whom is it helping? Surely not Joyce, who is long dead. And surely the purpose of copyright law is not to enrich an author’s descendants; its purpose must be to encourage authors to produce more work. This sort of travesty — harming current artists who are producing actual new work, while bringing society no more work from dead artists, and forcing artists to research who owns the copyright on any old work — is what we get with modern copyright law.
This copyright fiasco is exactly what has happened with The Grey Album (a mash-up of The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album). In fact, it gets better: the current artist (Jay-Z) released The Black Album on vinyl with no beats underneath, so that others could remix it (link courtesy of my friend Mike; my cache). The people responsible for pulling The Grey Album off the shelves were EMI, who own the rights to The Beatles’ work — The Beatles, you’ll recall, being a band half of whose members are dead. Of the remaining two living Beatles, one is a billionaire. These are not starving artists. They do not need more intellectual-property protection. They have achieved what many hope all artists will achieve: immense wealth in return for really astonishing work. But they’ve had more than 30 years to make money off their music. Now it’s time to let other artists play with their work and build their own out of it. It’s disgraceful that EMI would stop legitimate artistic exploration (The Grey Album is great; get it while you can), but completely legal in our screwed-up copyright system.