Vol. 16 No. 24 · 22 December 1994
pages 3-5 | 3741 words
The Undertaking
Thomas Lynch
Every year I bury one hundred and fifty of my townspeople. Another dozen or two I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995
From Peter Campbell
If you combine Thomas Lynch’s observation (LRB, 22 December 1994) on how the dead feel about what happens to their remains – ‘only the living care’ – and John Sutherland’s comments on copyright (LRB, 12 January), you come to the conclusion that authors’ rights should cease at death. Neither the argument that copyright makes a profession of letters possible, nor the argument that it gives creators control over their creations, has any force when the creators are no longer there to be encouraged or outraged, (I guess one must have a clause to cover the rights of destitute widowers and orphans, but I would means-test it.) This limitation on copyright would make attempts to control the reputations of writers by their executors more difficult, but these efforts have so often been counterproductive that there is no reason to believe that the dead would rise up. It would also straighten out problems like those of the publishers and authors of books about modern painting who find themselves paying sums of up to three figures for the right to reproduce single illustrations by the great recently-dead; the concept of fair dealing is not easy to apply to pictures, and reproduction fees are now so high that short-run monographs may become too expensive to be worth publishing. The Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) are bringing criminal charges against the publishers Thames and Hudson for infringement of copyright in a book about Max Beckmann. If DACS loses the case it may make things easier, and in a decade or so we will doubtless have the archives of the world’s galleries available electronically (if expensively). Then artbooks will again be books for reading not looking. In the meantime the interests of readers, writers and publishers seem to coincide. We would all be better off if the principle was accepted that copyright is a barrier to the exchange of ideas which can be justified only in terms of directly supporting those who have ideas in the first place.
Peter Campbell
London WC1
