Monday, March 01, 2010

Victor Hugo himself once wrote: "The writer as a writer has but one heir - the public domain."

Victor Hugo:

Le livre, comme livre, appartient à l’auteur, mais comme pensée, il appartient—le mot n’est pas trop vaste—au genre humain. Toutes les intelligences y ont droit. Si l’un des deux droits, le droit de l’écrivain et le droit de l’esprit humain, devait être sacrifié, ce serait, certes, le droit de l’écrivain, car l’intérêt public est notre préoccupation unique, et tous, je le déclare, doivent passer avant nous.

(Victor Hugo, Discours d’ouverture du Congrès littéraire international de 1878, 1878)

"Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a Public Domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The Public Domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture." (James Boyle, The Public Domain, p.40f, 2008)

http://publicdomainmanifesto.org/node/8

I don't think Victor Hugo would have been very happy with his grand children taking his "rights" to court:

"Mr Cérésa's lawyers argued that banning his novel would violate freedom of expression and prevent others using great works of art and literature as inspiration. Victor Hugo himself once wrote: "The writer as a writer has but one heir - the public domain."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/31/books.france

See also Against perpetual copyright by Lawrence Lessig. He writes about the practical problems with heirs of intellectual property:
http://wiki.lessig.org/index.php/Against_perpetual_copyright

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