Translation rights: from past riches to present poverty

The highly anticipated opening keynote speaker at METM24 in Carcassonne was David Bellos, translator of Georges Perec’s Life. A User’s Manual, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? and coauthor of Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs. This last book began life as a course he and coauthor Alexandre Montagu taught at Princeton University (where Bellos continues to teach), and served as the basis for his keynote address.

This historical ride began in Ancient Greece and Rome. In the classical world of Pliny the Elder and Virgil, codes of conduct regulated the plagiarism and forgery that modern copyright law purports to protect authors from. Had we only upheld these codes of conduct, Bellos posited, we could still be the rightful owners of our intellectual property but would receive much greater compensation for another’s right to publish it. Copyright, Bellos reminded us throughout his talk, was always meant to suppress unauthorized printing.

This slide illustrated the point he hoped to make (Ilya Vinitsky is a Princeton colleague):

Bellos sets the beginning of the end in 15th-century Venice, where patents for craftsmanship were well established when the Gutenberg press arrived, and something called printing privileges were first granted to local printers (the Da Spira brothers, in 1469). This privilege system restricted competition by granting exclusive rights to “copy” authors’ texts: to print the acquired “property”. This system of monopoly was prevalent until the 18th century, when the UK’s Statute of Anne replaced the then (1695) defunct Press Act. At this point Bellos quipped: “Royalties didn’t exist when there was royalty.”

Authorized printers (members of the UK guild known as the Stationers’ Company) paid for the exclusive right to print the texts they purchased. Here Bellos gave a few examples of what this meant to authors and their texts at the time, again quipping, for example, that a third of the texts Alexander Pope sold were on “cookery and fishing”, and while the sale of Paradise Lost meant about a year’s salary for Milton, it made the publisher, Jacob Tonson, rich.

Bellos then guided us through the legal progression of copyright, from the UK printers’ guild protest against the Statute of Anne’s granting copyright of 14 years, through Paris and the 1860 creation of the Association littéraire et artistique internationale (thank you, Victor Hugo), to the 1886 Berne convention under which, Bellos pointed out, translation rights were exempted – to encourage more countries to join, in the same way that cuckoo clocks had been exempted from music rights “to humor the Swiss”.

The expansion of translation rights, which have increased from 10 years to life plus 70 years, means that the value of translation rights has increased, while payment for their purchase has decreased. Bellos brought home this point by confessing that he had recently earned out the advance he received for his translation of George Perec’s A Life “just” 22 years later. He also confessed that Milan Kundera – known for tormenting his translators – had only this to say of Bellos’s work: “…but the commas are nice”.

During the Q&A, it was suggested that open-source software and creative commons are ways to sidestep copyright, and Bellos was reminded that the King James Bible and Peter Pan are the only texts still “owned by the Crown”.

In regard to pirated books, David Bellos insisted that “copyright makes hypocrites of us all” because piracy hurts the publisher. The damage to authors and translators is, like our royalties, minimal.

See more on Bellos’s book at this BookWithLegs podcast, and at this Hopscotch site.

This METM24 keynote was chronicled by Kymm Coveney.

Featured photo courtesy of MET. Slides reproduced with presenter’s permission.