COLLECTIVE ADMINISTRATION OF LITERARY WORKS: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE: THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE
| Published date | 01 March 1988 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb054905 |
| Date | 01 March 1988 |
| Pages | 5-13 |
| Author | Charles Clark,Colin Hadley |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
COLLECTIVE ADMINISTRATION
OF LITERARY WORKS:
PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE:
THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE*
by Charles Clark and Colin Hadley
Introduction
Let us start with one moment of recorded (even perhaps of illicitly reproduced) history:
We must take care to guard against two extremes equally prejudicial; this one, that men of ability,
who have employed their time for the service of their community, may not be deprived of their
just merits, and the reward of their ingenuity and labour, the other, that the world may not be
deprived of improvements, nor the progress of the arts be retarded.
Those were the words of Lord Mansfield in a case which involved the rights and wrongs
of copying, decided over 200 years ago in the case of Sayre v Moore in 1785. And
the task of reconciling the interests of those — authors and their business partners,
publishers — who create copyright works with the interests of those — students,
teachers, researchers — who use copyright works through copying them is still with
us.
It may nicely turn out, in the long perspective of history, that the moment of the
technology which totally changed the context of reconciliation (that is the invention
of the Xerox machine) which opened the doors to massive infringement of the rights
of creators was also the moment of the technology of reconciliation (that is the
invention of the computer) which opened the doors to control of and reward for that
massive infringement. Photocopying machinery has made individual control of the
creators' rights of reproduction impossible, so that collective control and reward
through collecting societies has become not just desirable, but necessary. And that
collective control and reward depend on the capacities of the computer to absorb,
record and distribute.
265,000,000,000 Illicit Copies
It is important also, by way of introduction, to grasp the sheer size of the issue. One
recent estimate put the global figure for illicit copy pages at 265 billion. There are
indications that in the advanced national economies of Western Europe approximately
200 copy pages per head of population would be a reasonable estimate of national
use of copyright works. And in the UK we know, as closely as we can know from
detailed records, that the state schools system uses approximately 90 million copy
pages per year. In the university sector, a survey of an Australian university yielded
2.1 million acts of copying per academic year. The role of collective administration
of rights in literary works is not therefore peripheral to the copyright system. It is
rapidly becoming the copyright system's central strategy for literary works in
reconciling creator and user interests. Lord Mansfield's dictum holds true for developed
*This paper was first presented to IFRRO 14, October 1987 5
To continue reading
Request your trial