Owning Up

Given that it’s about three weeks into term, you’ve probably started to hate your sourcebooks for their content instead of their price. Before going on, let me refresh your memory: You paid 100 bucks for a thick stack of photocopies bound in cheap plastic. That the process of shelling out your hard-earned dough has been made easier through Harvard Printing and Publishing Service’s (HPPS) new online ordering system is nice, but only as the new system that allows me to pay my parking tickets on the web is nice. It is a natural extension of textbook-induced early-term poverty to wonder why these prices are so exorbitantly high. The answer is not simple, but thanks to a developing collection of exciting new ideas, the resolution may be soon at hand.

The sordid history of the American copyright code is, well, sordid. Once upon a time to acquire a copyright (lasting 14 years, with option to renew once) you had to file lots of paperwork with the government. Through two centuries of litigation and legislation this process has come to be substantially amended: now to acquire a copyright (lasting your whole life, plus about 70 years), you simply publish. To use any piece of published content—which is automatically protected by copyright law—you must obtain permission from the copyright holder.

This is a problem, because it would seem a great many producers of brilliant content would love to give it out for certain uses free of charge, but are unable to address all the requests to do so. Consider for example Pierce Professor of Psychology Emeritus B. F. Skinner, who is quite dead. In life, he was a faculty member of this fine institution, and it was probably not his intention that students here would have to pay publishing fees for copies of his works. And Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker has managed to obtain a special waiver of royalties and publishers’ fees for the reprints of his own book used in the sourcebook for his class, this agreement only holds because he is the instructor and it doesn’t give him power over fees for other classes, let alone at other schools.

The real issue in question is, ironically, one of too little control: there simply have not been good mechanisms in place to allow copyright holders to specify when they don’t want to charge royalties or require permission. The copyright code itself, after years and years of strengthening by such neutral parties as Disney, (who, it should noted, renewed strongly their interest in copyright code around the time when they would have otherwise lost their exclusive rights to that famous big-eared mouse), is more or less unflappable at this point.

Fortunately, some smart lawyers and forward thinkers have finally started closing the gap. A movement called the “Creative Commons” led by Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, has created an airtight legal license that allows would-be copyright holders to attach to their works a variety of freedoms. For example, an author might attach to one of their articles the permission to reprint with attribution, but without explicit consent, for noncommercial purposes. Currently the licenses can allow for such things as sampling of multimedia or requiring that people only release derivative works under the same sort of open structure, but new educational agreements are also in the works.

The obvious objection here is that the copyrights for most of this content are not owned by its creators, but rather by some publishing house that clearly wants to charge royalties whenever it can. And it seems likely that the most prestigious academic journals can ask whatever they want of authors who need to be printed to be heard.

But journals are only prestigious because they have good peer reviewers and lots of momentum. Publishers rely on creative people for the success of their businesses. You are the creative people: you write theses, articles and books. You slave away for hours cleaning test tubes to get your name listed eighth on some biology paper. You’re also the rising class of grad students and the rising generation of professors, lawyers, authors and doctors. So the key is to take an interest in the important issues of ownership that surround the variety of materials you are (or will soon be) responsible for.

There are some artists out there who really do want to charge thousands of dollars for the right to use three or four lines of their song or show a five-second clip of their television show. I’m going to assume you are not one of these artists, but it’s still essential to be proactive. Bug your advisers and professors and make them ask about acquiring additional control over their publications. Read about Creative Commons and apply it everywhere it can be applied. At best, this careful forethought will open the floodgates to a whole new wealth of freely available educational material in the very near future. And at the very least, your sourcebooks, or at least your children’s sourcebooks, won’t be quite so damn pricey.

Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.