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Copyrights and Copywrongs by Siva Vaidhyanathan, New York University Press,
$27.95, ISBN 0814788068

WHO owns and controls scientific papers: researchers or universities? Should
Napster be allowed to distribute other people’s music over the Web? Questions
such as these have propelled copyright scholars blinking into the limelight. But
just what rights should authors and artists have over their work?

Siva Vaidhyanathan sets out to argue for reducing copyright law to the
absolute minimum. He rejects the concept underpinning British and much American
law—that copyright is a property right. Logically enough, I suppose,
because property is perpetual and his goal is to get everything rapidly into the
public domain. He rejects the alternative, continental European view that sees
an author’s rights as synonymous with their human rights. Maybe it’s because
“natural rights” conflict with the utilitarian free market ideology. Or perhaps
it’s simply because they are un-American, and this is a book about American law
and culture.

The most interesting thing about this book is its historical perspective on
US legal discourse. The utterances of the Founding Fathers and Oliver Wendell
Holmes are picked over with an enthusiasm resembling the medieval natural
theologian’s reverence for Aristotle.

In the end, it’s not clear that Vaidhyanathan has progressed beyond the
teenager’s cry of “Why can’t I do what I like?” He deals only with conflict
between users and “rightsholders”, and wholly neglects the recent US supreme
court ruling that electronic news distribution must have a separate copyright
authorisation. The lesson of this case is that the bigger conflict is between
authors/researchers and publishers. His book bears a copyright notice, of
course: it’s owned outright by New York University.