Some of Gary's questions are answered in this abridged version of a plenary lecture given Alistair McCleery at the Making Books, Shaping Readers conference at University College Cork in April. I found it by googling. so I assume it is safe to distribute it, although the last post is not so comforting. Here are couple of excerpts:
"The zombies wander the land; the lone survivor tries desperately to find support and resources. This might describe any number of films, but it also acts as a metaphor for the contemporary editor or biographer dealing with the undead of literary estates. The creative artist is long deceased, and what lives on is the administration of the literary estate, mechanistic in its movements and predatory in its actions. The literary estate uses the letter of copyright to disadvantage the scholarly work of editors and biographers in ways that the spirit of copyright does not justify."
Later...
"Copyright was put on a statutory footing in the UK in the 18th century as a means of providing a living for those who worked by their brain as opposed to their hands. It was regarded as a form of "intangible property", albeit of limited term. It covered expression of ideas but not the ideas themselves.
Adam Smith argued that creative artists (and lawyers) were worthy of a higher return than other workers because of the longer investment in their training.
The later European view of copyright regarded a published work as the author's offspring as much as his property, endowing him with inalienable moral as well as tradeable commercial rights.
The Anglo-American tradition in copyright, which is based firmly in the notion of property and income, resisted this concept. In the UK, only two general moral rights, of identity and integrity, crept in with the 1995 European Union harmonisation legislation; other rights, more restrictive about how the material could be used, were rejected. In the US there are no moral rights, only property rights, for authors."
According to McCleery, the results are rather dismal, so publc agitation is needed.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402227&c=1
Sumitra Shah
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