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work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual descendants from
Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky — if their work con-
tinues to be “protected” by copyright, it might just vanish from
the face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain.
This isn’t to say that copyright is bad, but that there’s such a thing
as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too
much good copyright is a bad thing. It’s like chilis in soup: a little
goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.
From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to
the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first
preference for new media is its “democratic-ness” — the ease with
which it can reproduced.
(And please, before we get any further, forget all that business
about how the Internet’s copying model is more disruptive than
the technologies that preceded it. For Christ’s sake, the Vaude-
ville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to
go from a regime where they had
one hundred percent
control over
who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime
where they had
zero
percent control over who could build or ac-
quire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For
that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a
Luther Bible — next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts.)
Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has
traded off its artifact-ness — the degree to which it was populated
by bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master
craftspeople — for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren’t as ex-
pressive as good piano players, but they scaled better — as did
radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand
illumination, and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in com-
parison to the ability of an individual to actually get a copy of her
own.
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