Mark Helprin on Copyright

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2009

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Novelist Mark Helprin talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about copyright and the ideas in his book, Digital Barbarism. Helprin argues for an extension rather than a reduction in the length of time that authors have control over their work. He also argues that technology is often not attuned to human needs and physical constraints, claiming that tranquility is elusive in modern times. He sees the movement against copyright and intellectual property generally as part of an educational and social trend toward collective rather than individual work.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:36.5	Today is June 10th, 2009, and my guest is Mark Helperen, the great novelist and author of
0:44.6	the Don Fiction book, Digital Barbarism, a writer's manifesto. Mr. Helperen, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:51.6	Thank you. I'd like to point out right off the bat that a writer's manifesto is not really part
0:57.5	of my title. It's the kind of thing that the publisher's put on a book, you know, such as a love
1:05.2	among the palm trees. It's a descriptive thing that's on the cover, that's all. It's a defense of
1:13.7	copyright and much, much more. Talk about your article The New York Times and how that led to this
1:19.0	book. I was, for many years, The New York Times has been not happy with me for various reasons,
1:28.2	which are relevant here. It's been about 25 years. I was there, darling for 10 or 15 years,
1:36.1	but 10 years before that or more, and then it switched the other way. And about a couple years
1:44.2	ago, the op-ed page called me up and said, we'd like you to write an article for us, which I thought
1:49.8	was very nice. I'm always willing to make peace with people. So I said, lovely, I'll do it.
1:56.5	And I thought to myself, well, to be, you know, diplomatic, as I'm usually not, what I'll do is
2:01.4	I'll choose a topic which is entirely inoffensive. And what can I possibly write about that would not
2:07.7	offend anybody? And I thought, well, what about copyright? Nobody cares about copyright except
2:12.5	Hollywood lawyers, and they're not even human. And so it doesn't matter what they think. So I wrote
2:17.9	an article about copyright in which I aired a few things that I had been thinking since I first
2:23.6	had my first copyright, which was way back in the in the 60s. And the article The Times then
	...

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