Public domain copyright. Just think Mylar

SURE, THE SUPREME COURT'S 7-2 decision in favor of perpetual copyright and against Eric Eldred was a bit of a downer for those who believe in a public domain, but has anyone thought to accentuate the positives of this ruling? After all, there are CTEA beneficiaries completely aside from the big content fatcats, many of whom have never contributed a dime to the campaign war chest of South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings.

Think of mylar. Companies generating sleeves of that wonderful substance, the only thing separating never-republished pulp magazines from oblivion, can look forward to 20 more years of sales and increased demand as 70-year-old hardbounds wither.

Then there's the ebook community. Dr. Michael Hart, who as founder of Project Gutenberg was there to protest the '76 extension along with the '96 one, might not be seen to gain much from this ruling, what with his being a staunch advocate of global literacy, education for a healthy democracy and all that stuff. However the man's volunteer organization would have just gotten bogged down and confused at the chance to legally add Harlem Renaissance writers or dumb old Scott Fitzgerald to their oft-mirrored, instantly accesible free book collection.

With the Bono Act upheld, Gutenbergers know that they can only work on materials printed before 1923, keeping things from lapsing into total chaos and sparing Dr. Hart from having to answer a bunch of questions about whether Hemingway's Sun Also Rises could be added this year or next. Sigh of relief I hear, Michael?

OK, you're asking: what's in it for schools? I know, I know, they're taxpayer-funded and should at least have the option of giving kids a file to download if five or six decades have passed. But listen, the books business, it's a business. You can trust 'em. Every publishing type I talk too, asking them about things maybe costing too much, they always say either the books are reasonably priced or it's somebody else's fault. Always. And anyway, the CTEA is so good for schools, you just have no idea.

Don't believe me? OK, think of geography. Everybody knows, American kids don't do so well in geography. It's a shame. But, ahh--thanks to CTEA, solution appears! You get your students in a class with a map and tell them publishing around 1% of the books written 70 years ago is like a company selling bottled water from Old Faithful. Then you point the kids at big national parks like Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, Denali, and you say "kids, that's the 'public domain.'" Then you tell the young'uns, "kids, on accounta somebody's business selling bottled water from Old Faithful, nothing's ever gonna enter the public domain again. Sorry. Off limits from now on." You do this, any class, you'll have those tender eyes focused on the map for quite a while. Enough teachers do this, the U.S. will be neck and neck with Singapore at the identify-your-home-nation-on-a-globe Olympics.

Or take literature. Can't see a good scenario here? Well, just imagine: an adjunct professor teaches a summer elective. English 126--Terrorism in Fiction. She's attracting non-majors to this course, so to ensure everybody actually reads the books, she assigns free titles from Gutenberg and elsewhere. Things go great with Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Secret Agent, and keep hopping when Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday is discussed. But then, the syllabus hump is reached. James' Princess Casamassima, already a tough read, is made tougher by virtue of the accesible online version having been redacted from a magazine edition (James himself complained about the editors getting crazy with the comments.)

We see our poor instructor, charges staring dully at her with heavy-lidded eyes that, in a hopeful moment, she attributes to the after effects of June-July binge drinking. Then, as the kids trudge off for a break during the three-hour session, many ominously setting backpacks to shoulders, she whispers the one phrase that keeps students attentive: "forbidden sex." Gazes widen, the crew returns fast in their entirety, and they spend the last week tearing into a course-closing discussion on Dostoevsky's The Possessed (The Devils). Lots of reading and much learning, but only when the essay is collected does our heroine answer: "sex? Oh, yes. The chapter 'At Tihon's'--in some ways a precursor to Lolita. Unfortunately it was excised from the original translation of 1915, and not published until 1936, after Judge Woolsey's decision in Ulysses. Very interesting reading though."

Had a student possessed the 1936 version, they'd have detected little of a truly prurient nature in the passage that so offended back when. However, because of CTEA, literature faculty across the land can hint at exciting bits of text in free books, only to later comment in the end, "oh, that's right: we're still in the Comstock era of pre-'23! Silly me." But in the meanwhile, the students will be ripping through each title, splitting up into teams, double-checking each other's interepretations of text, all in a quest to find that missing piece!

But perhaps the finest contribution CTEA can make to education is in the business or economics curriculumn. Many the newspaper account that maligns developing nations for their industries dominated by "crony capitalism," leading to nonexistent growth outside marked increases in perks for a few. We saw something like that here with the stock market meltdown, but admit it, two years and a movie later, nobody really knows what Enron did exactly. Is there a domestic example of an industry that refuses to innovate and gets by with big government connections and bribes--err, campaign donations?

Enter publishing. Backed by the CTEA, and following a decade when more emphasis was placed on salaries accorded to a skilled and knowledgeable worker than at any time in history, you'd think these book guys must be rolling in it, particularly when you consider how all those great pre-'40s authors like Hemingway, Hammett and Hurston are only available in trade paperbacks that start at $15 or more. And wasn't Harry Potter huge?

Well it turns out that publishing, despite the little wizard, despite CTEA, despite a booming school age population, despite churning out envelope-pushing works on adult incest, only managed to grow about 4% over the last decade, or 1% after inflation. One percent annual growth for books in the "information economy." Is that state-run oil or what? Lively class discussions here on how to classify, in addition to the "contributions," multi-million dollar advances to political figures for the rights to books that'll sell in the thousands.

So buck up, America. CTEA, Congress and the Sonny Bono act are working for you too. µ

David Moynihan is webmaster at Blackmask Online, where he writes an almost-daily newsletter on ebooks and ebook news.