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By David Rothman

Tim BuckleyIs copyright “fundamentally incompatible with Christian scholarship”? More via New Zealand-based Tim Buckley‘s Sansblogue, which says it is not. But another writer, Christian Bell, uses that phrase. Writing earlier this year for a student newspaper at faith-oriented Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he said: “The primary motivation of copyright is to protect two things: profit and pride.”

Hmm. In Darknet, J.D. Lasica mentioned copyright in a religious context, among others; and now I’m starting to wonder if one way to sway the Bush administration might be through its evangelical allies. The angle wouldn’t be, “Abolish copyright,” but rather: “Stop letting Hollywood greedsters run the show.” Look, it isn’t as if Hollywood is that helpful in the war against terorrism. To no small extent it’s actually aggravated the problem. I’d remind the anti-religious that Saul Alinksky did some of his most effective organizing among Catholic conservatives. Among his admirers: The pragmatic Hillary Clinton, who wrote a college thesis on him. She’ll go where the votes are, and if the Dems see the Hollywood connection working against them, they’ll respond accordingly. Hey, I don’t mind Dems taking Hollywood money. I do mind all the strings that come attached. Wouldn’t it be great to weaken Hollywood’s control of D.C. and for the money to come in without Dems like “populist” John Edwards having to shut up on major copyright issues like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act?

Related: Access denied, in the Guardian, which warns against big media using copyright law as a tool to suppress uppity competition from the grassroots.

Details: Start of Bell article:

Allow me to propose a radical thesis: Copyright is fundamentally incompatible with Christian scholarship.

That statement ought to shake the tree trunk of our professional and academic work. Copyright is one of the safeguards of our academic profession;

Many will say that without it, it isn’t clear how scholarship could continue.

But consider that we live in an era where our ideas (which are now called “intellectual property”) are under an increasing amount of legislative and judicial restriction. Recent legal movements such as lawsuits over media copyrights should cause us to wonder who owns our thoughts, or indeed, should anybody? As Christian scholars, we must oppose the very notion of copyright and marginalize it as a selfish and idolatrous temptation that is squeezing the life out of our work.

Copyright, to borrow a definition from the U.S. Copyright Office, is “a form of protection … to the authors of ‘original works of authorship.’” This protection is available “to both published and unpublished works,” and it gives copyright holders the exclusive right to “reproduce the work in copies,” “prepare derivative works,” “distribute copies of the work to the public by sale,” and “perform [and display] the work publicly.”

At first glance, that all seems fine. After all, we’re quite used to the basic idea of copyright — no unauthorized reproduction of copyrightedmaterial and so forth. What’s the problem?

The problem is that copyright places restraints on both scholasticism and scholars; it locks ideas up under the ownership of particular people who are legally entitled to do whatever they want with it. Furthermore, any derivative use of copyrighted material must acknowledge — and frequently pay — for the right to use the original work.

In doing so, copyright denigrates the communal nature of scholarship. When our scholarship is done for the church, it is not a stretch to say that copyright denigrates the communal nature of Christian worship also.
The proper method — and the historical method — for Christian scholarship is for our work to be conducted by members of the body of Christ for the benefit and enjoyment of the rest of the body. Simply put, our work must serve Christ. This does not mean that attribution and citation go by the wayside — a quick glance through a historical theology book quickly dispels that idea. It simply means that attribution and citation aren’t barriers to distribution.

Copyright, however, introduces an artificial legal construction whose stated intention is to protect so-called “original works of authorship” from having their work unfairly attributed to or confiscated by another person. It follows from this that it also protects an author’s right to profit from the work’s distribution…

 
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