Normally the Copyright Alliance is about celebrating all creators, but sometimes we single out an individual here or there. Naturally I'd like to give a shout-out to all of the Oscar winners from last night, but actually this blog is about a prolific novelist whose latest work "Freefall" has hit the New York Times Bestseller list. In this link she's currently at #21, but in my hard copy of the New York Times on Sunday she was at #20, listed in the same column as Ian McEwan ("Atonement") and perennial bestseller Nora Roberts. (Yes, some of us still read the printed word, both newspapers and novels.)

The author I'm referring to is JoAnn Ross, who also happens to be my mother. She has been writing my whole life, from feature stories to humor columns, and sold her first two books within a week or so of each other when I was about 15. This isn't her first time on the NYT list, but that doesn't make it any less special.

This author has thrived in a world where a combination of talent and hard work can get you recognized by agents and publishers and get you discovered by readers. So what does this have to do with the digital revolution, you ask? Well, my mother has been fortunate to be working in a medium that has been somewhat resistant to digitization, so there were actually financial incentives for her to create, and create she has, about 100 published novels at last count. Yes, there is increasingly a piracy threat for books, but when you hear the digirati talk about the golden age of the Internet, it is music and movies that they cite when they discuss restrictions on their enjoyment.

We are constantly told that however well copyright has served us from the Statute of Anne in 1710 to the present, however well Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution has benefited society by ensuring a right of authors and inventors to their writings and discoveries, however much we've enjoyed living in the most creative society in the history of the planet, copyright is antiquated in an age where reproduction can be done at almost no cost and thus artificial scarcity disappears. This mindset holds that the value of the work is in the copy, not in the inherent work itself. I must disagree. Anyone can copy something, but only my mother could have written "Freefall," and all those people who bought it (the NYT only measured its first few days of sales, less than a week, in calculating its place on the list) had the opportunity to buy it because our system of laws and culture respects the right my mother has over her writings.

Clamor if you will for a system that extends readers, viewers and listeners of creative works a "right" to do as they please, but denies creators their rights, saying only that they deserve to be paid (with something other than the free market calculating how much that is). I believe the digital age and copyright are 100% compatible, as long as we continue to remember that we have no creative works without creators, and the creators create because of the rights guaranteed them. 

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 1:20 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators, market forces, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.