Writer and novelist Mark Helprin drew the ire of hundreds of thousands of readers when he argued for the extension of copyright laws in a New York Times op-ed article two years ago. His recent book, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, fleshes out his key arguments in defense of authors’ rights. In this What Matters podcast, he speaks with McKinsey’s Mary Kuntz about his book and his belief that the “all free, all the time” ethos of the Internet threatens to erode the creation of new knowledge and new art.

^{The audio interview was edited from a longer conversation with Mary Kuntz.}

Download MP3 [9.6 MB]

Mary Kuntz: Mark, thanks very much for joining us today.

Mark Helprin: You’re welcome.

Mary Kuntz: You stirred up quite a hornet’s nest two years ago with your op-ed in the New York Times, in which you argued for an extension of copyright laws. That piece drew hundreds of thousands of angry online comments. And I think it’s safe to say that the book that grew out of that debate has not been anymore warmly received by your critics. Were you surprised by the controversy and by the vitriol?

Mark Helprin: Originally, when I first wrote the article, I had not written an op-ed for the Times in a very long time. And I was surprised when they came to me and asked me to write for them—and delighted. And I searched for something which I thought would be noncontroversial. And I said, “What could be less controversial than copyright?” Nobody cares about it except Hollywood lawyers. And they’re not even human! So why not write about copyright?

It’ll just pass unnoticed. And it’s a good way to get back into the stream of the Times op-ed. So I wrote this piece thinking that no one would even look at it, that it would be a yawn. And then it got three-quarters of a million angry responses. So I was surprised by that. I was not surprised when the same set of people received the book in the same way, because the book was obviously an extension of the piece.

Mary Kuntz: Right. That piece dealt pretty narrowly with copyright law. And it’s apparent from the comments you got that there’s a big movement out there of people who are interested in the reverse, in loosening copyright restrictions. And I’d like to break that down just a bit. A big part of your concern, clearly, had to do with the financial implications. You argued that copyright should be extended beyond the current span of 70 years after the death of an author. Can you tell us a little bit about your reasoning there?

Mark Helprin: I operate under the assumption which I obtain from looking at the past and seeing how things have developed: that copyright actually strengthens [not only] the culture but the production of things that are copyrighted—what’s commonly called, and it’s a terrible word, content.

Before there was copyright, there was very little incentive for people to actually write things and assemble information. With the development of copyright, all that has increased. So we’re riding on a flood now of information such as the world has never seen in terms of print publications—newspapers, journals, magazines, et cetera.

The amount of information that has been generated and the amount of works that have been written—it’s phenomenal. The trend worldwide has been to extend the term of copyright, starting in England centuries ago and then on the continent and in the United States. Gradually over the centuries, the term has been extended. And as it has been extended, it’s been healthy for the culture. And also people, of course, live longer these days. And a personal motivation, not for me exactly, but for the people who actually produce these things, because I thought, well, if I die, when I die, rather, 70 years after my death everything that I have worked in my life to make will go into the public domain. And my children will probably be alive then, almost certainly be alive then.

Certainly my grandchildren will be. And I thought, why is that? If you have a hotel or a real-estate business or a flower mill, that doesn’t happen to you. What you’ve built up over your life isn’t simply allowed to pass into the hands of anyone who wants it. And I thought that this would be just and also salutary for the culture in general.

Mary Kuntz: There are a lot of people out there, though, people in business, as well as artists in many fields, who would argue that the kind of frictionless and widespread collaboration enabled by the Internet will, itself, unleash a great outpouring of innovation and artistic output and that by sequestering intellectual property with copyright restrictions for a longer period rather than opening it to the public domain will actually hamper that process. What is your reaction to them?

Mark Helprin: That’s based on one of the many, many misconceptions that the people who are essentially against copyright share. That misconception is that art and also even certain types of writing are based upon piecing together previous things. They don’t understand how these things are made. The mass of them who responded to me, they don’t understand that you cannot copyright pure information. You can’t copyright an idea. You can’t copyright a process. You can’t copyright a plot. You can’t copyright even a particular phrase, necessarily.

Copyright is not so restrictive that it has stopped the creation of works since its beginning, hardly. But there’s a myth that you need to have an absolute freedom to take from other people’s work and reproduce it in order to make your own work. Well, that’s not how it’s done. It never has been done that way. And it shouldn’t be done that way.

Mary Kuntz: Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. Clearly, the issues that you’re raising are not solely or even primarily financial. You’re talking about the definition of art and authorship. There’s a lot of activity online right now that’s all about collaboration and crowd sourcing. And some of what gets produced that way people call art. I gather that you would take issue with that?

Mark Helprin: I would. Crowd sourcing—to me, the words are a nightmare. The great achievement of Western civilization, anyway, has been to end the collective approach to things that marked the early history of man.

In other words, you were defined as part of a group. You were a serf. You were a peasant. You were a slave or whatever. And then in medieval times, you were a member of a guild. And the rights of the individual didn’t really count. What happened with the Greeks and then with Roman law and then over a long, long period culminating in modern times is that we have refined the rights of the individual. Now, obviously collaboration can be very powerful, and it’s important, and we do things in concert with one another. And we advance science that way and many things. But there’s really nothing that can substitute for one mind and one voice.

Mary Kuntz: Well, let me ask you something. This is just a hypothetical. What if you were working on a new novel and you got stuck on the ending, you just couldn’t find a way to wrap it up and make the plot work. And let’s say you put the problem to a wide following of smart, engaged, intelligent Mark Helprin fans. And one of them or several of them working together came up with the perfect solution. And you used their idea, which, in fact, was better than anything you would come up with. Would the novel that resulted be any less valid?

Mark Helprin: I don’t know what you mean exactly by valid. But what I can say is I would never do that. If you look at the history of literature, it’s never been done that way. In school, they have what they call “brainstorming,” which I think is a comic-book word. They have what they call “writing webs.” They sit and they criticize each other’s writing, sort of like people in the Soviet on a factory floor.

And this is not the way that it should be. And I guarantee you that the product of this will be far, far less valuable than the product of somebody straining to do his best and taking responsibility for it also. When I read the papers these days, I go crazy not just because of the content—I certainly go crazy because of that—but because of the way that they’re written. People don’t know how to write anymore. They are so imprecise. They make so many mistakes.

One reason [for this] is they themselves are not responsible. It’s like the difference between the AP and a newspaper in which you have a byline. When your name is on it, it’s your honor. You’re responsible for it. If there’s no name on it, it gets very, very careless. And if it’s the product of several people, well, each one leaves it to the others. And the quality has degraded.

Mary Kuntz: One other argument that I think came up was the idea that a lot of copyrights are allowed to languish, and therefore since there is no apparent owner, there’s no access to that property, no ability to negotiate for rights.

Mark Helprin: Right, that’s the “orphan works” argument. There’s a book called Secret Tibet. So let’s say you wanted to read that book, Secret Tibet. Well, thanks to the Internet, you could probably get it in many, many places used, no question about it. It’s in libraries, but, of course, only a very small number of people would actually want it. That’s why it’s out of print. If suddenly, you know, by some miracle, let’s say, in the way that the movie The English Patient stimulated people to buy Herodotus, if by some miracle a million people wanted to buy Secret Tibet then some publisher would put it back into print because you can find a way to put it back into print because the copyright is registered.

And let’s say that the author was dead, and it was out of print. You could either find his heirs through the publisher or you could, in the most extreme case—and this is what I suggested in my book—you could have a registry in which the money for the rights would be paid into an escrow account. And if in, let’s say, 10 years or 20 years no one claims them, then that money could be given to a fund, for example, to prosecute copyright violations.

Mary Kuntz: Getting back for a moment to the idea of sort of the general degradation of culture, how much of that do you think is related? An awful lot of people, you know, run across your stuff online without paying anything. Is that related at all to the ideas you’re talking about?

Mark Helprin: Yes, I think so. And for two reasons. One of them is that there’s a lot less work that has to be done in order to get information. And part of being educated and part of actually learning something is the work that you do.

When things are made easy, you get soft. So if you can get things instantaneously at the snap of a finger, then you don’t have the discipline that is required for judgment. That’s number one.

Number two, with the individual tailoring that’s possible with the Internet, in other words, you can make a newspaper essentially just for you. And you just take what you want instead of having to plow through other things. You only read what you want, really.

And only reading what you want is a very dangerous thing. That’s one reason why we have such tremendous political polarization. And, of course, that’s a phenomenon that started before the Internet, because you can block out information—it has nothing to do with electronics.

But with the Internet and with the ability to tailor things, the ability to do that—to block out information that you don’t want that’s not pleasant for you—is increased. So what happens is you get people who essentially feed on their own prejudices.

I always recommended to my own children that they read at least two newspapers of differing tendencies. Otherwise, you just become essentially a fool because you don’t know what the other side is really saying. As for the freedom of it, there’s a slogan that is: information wants to be free.

But in order for there to be information, somebody has to work in order to compile it, to digest it, to report it, to make it. There are people who are actually working to do it. And the idea that it should just be free is like the idea that food should be free.

Well, you can’t have that. There really is no such thing as something that’s free. And information is just like that. If you don’t pay for it, it will disappear.

Mary Kuntz: A lot of people would respond to that by pointing to Wikipedia and other crowd-sourced entities like that where lots of people contribute little bits of time, and the overall effect is something that’s valuable and up to date and, in the case of Wikipedia, actually surprisingly accurate.

Mark Helprin: I don’t share that opinion about Wikipedia, having read my own page and also read pages of people that I know. Wikipedia is more or less like the Encyclopedia Britannica only, yes, it’s free. If everything were to be converted to that model, to that economic model, there would then be nothing. It would stop.

They’ll just cite Wikipedia and then they won’t have anything else to cite. There won’t be any really new stuff created.

Mary Kuntz: Given all this, how do we put the genie back in the bottle? Given the world we live in and the technology that’s available to anyone, what’s the answer?

Mark Helprin: The first thing is that you look at it with an open mind and with a critical view of whatever the arguments are, I mean, including my argument. There’s a tremendous tendency, particularly in the electronic world, not to weigh things and criticize them.

Secondly, of course, from my point of view, it would be to protect the individual voice, to protect the culture that we have—which is an extraordinarily rich thing that’s been developed over thousands of years—by not rushing to, for example, weaken copyright.

Mary Kuntz: Well, it’ll be interesting to see where this goes over the next few years. I appreciate your time. And maybe we’ll come back and revisit this.

Mark Helprin: Well, thank you very much.

Back to top